Vanishing Languages
Every few weeks, somewhere in the world, the last fluent speaker of a language dies, and with them an entire way of describing reality quietly disappears. Linguists estimate that of the roughly seven thousand languages spoken today, nearly half may vanish before the end of the century. To many people this sounds regrettable but not especially urgent. After all, if everyone simply switches to a larger, more useful language, surely communication becomes easier?
This reasoning, however, misses what is genuinely lost. A language is not merely a set of labels for objects that exist everywhere; it is a unique system for organising thought and experience. Some languages encode subtle distinctions of time, relationship, or direction that have no neat equivalent elsewhere. When such a language disappears, the knowledge embedded in it - about local plants, navigation, or oral history - often vanishes too, because it was never written down.
The causes are rarely dramatic. Languages seldom die because they are banned outright; more often they fade because young people, seeking education and work, drift towards a dominant language and gradually stop using the tongue of their grandparents. Each individual choice is reasonable, yet the cumulative effect is the slow erosion of diversity.
There are reasons for cautious hope. Communities from New Zealand to Wales have revived languages once thought to be dying, using schools, technology, and stubborn determination. Such efforts will never save every endangered tongue. But they demonstrate that decline is not inevitable, and that a language, far from being a quaint relic, can remain a living thread connecting a community to its past and to one another.
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- 1
Why does the writer argue that losing a language matters more than it might seem?
- 2
According to the passage, why do most languages die out?
- 3
What is the writer's attitude in the final paragraph?
- 4
The writer suggests that knowledge embedded in a language can disappear because it was never written down.
- 5
The passage claims that the decline of endangered languages is completely inevitable.
- 6
Which ideas are presented in the passage? (Choose all that apply.)
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- When a Language Falls Silent — Прочитайте текст і виконайте завдання. · Every few weeks, somewhere in the world, the last fluent speaker of a language dies, and with them an entire way of describing reality quietly disappears. Linguists estimate that of the roughly seven thousand languages spoken today, nearly half may vanish before the end of the century. To many people this sounds regrettable but not especially urgent. After all, if everyone simply switches to a larger, more useful language, surely communication becomes easier? This reasoning, however, misses what is genuinely lost. A language is not merely a set of labels for objects that exist everywhere; it is a unique system for organising thought and experience. Some languages encode subtle distinctions of time, relationship, or direction that have no neat equivalent elsewhere. When such a language disappears, the knowledge embedded in it - about local plants, navigation, or oral history - often vanishes too, because it was never written down. The causes are rarely dramatic. Languages seldom die because they are banned outright; more often they fade because young people, seeking education and work, drift towards a dominant language and gradually stop using the tongue of their grandparents. Each individual choice is reasonable, yet the cumulative effect is the slow erosion of diversity. There are reasons for cautious hope. Communities from New Zealand to Wales have revived languages once thought to be dying, using schools, technology, and stubborn determination. Such efforts will never save every endangered tongue. But they demonstrate that decline is not inevitable, and that a language, far from being a quaint relic, can remain a living thread connecting a community to its past and to one another.