Why do languages die?

The words he mentions at the beginning of the video belong to languages...

• that might disappear soon.

• that were spoken in the past.

• that he would like to speak.

Answer explanation

I don't speak those languages. In fact, very few people do. They're used only by a handful of people and all those languages are in danger of extinction.

Which sentence is correct?

• 40% of languages have disappeared.

• Over 17,000 languages are spoken in the world.

• One out of three languages in the world have fewer than 1,000 speakers.

Answer explanation

There are more than 7,000 languages spoken in the world today. But about a third of those have fewer than 1,000 speakers and according to UNESCO more than 40% of those languages are in danger of extinction. In fact, every fortnight, one of the world's languages disappears forever.

According to the video, Latin...

• died over 2,000 ago.

• is still spoken today but in different forms.

• was the first important language to die.

Answer explanation

When you say dead language, many people think of Latin. But, Latin actually never died. It's been spoken continuously since the time of the Caesars, but it changed very gradually over 2,000 years until it became French, Spanish, and other romance languages.

The chart shows...

• languages in danger of extinction.

• the health of today's languages.

• the languages that are still spoken and extinct languages.

Answer explanation

True language death happens when communities switch to other languages and parents stop raising their children to speak their old one. When the last elderly speaker dies, the language is unlikely ever to be spoken fluently again.If you look at this chart which measures the world's languages in terms of their size and their state of health, you can see that most languages are ranked in the middle. English, like just a few other dominant languages, is up at the top left-hand corner. It's in a really strong state. But if your language is down here in the bottom right-hand corner of the graph, like Kayapulau from Indonesia or Kuruaya from Brazil, you are are in serious trouble.

In the Soviet Union, ...

• the government forced the people to speak only Russian.

• some people refused to speak Russian.

• young people saw how necessary it was to speak Russian.

Answer explanation

In the bad, old days governments just banned languages they didn't like. But sometimes the pressure is more subtle. Any teenager growing up in the Soviet Union soon realized that whatever language you spoke at home, mastering Russian was going to be the key to success. Citizens of China, including Tibetans, as well as speakers of Shanghainese or Cantonese, face similar pressure today to focus on Mandarin.

Hebrew...

• is the only dead language that came to life again.

• is the official language in more than one country.

• has four million speakers.

Answer explanation

ust one language has ever come back from the dead: Hebrew. It was extinct for two millennia but Jewish settlers to Palestine in the early 20th century spoke different languages back in Europe and they adopted Hebrew on their arrival as their common language. It became Israel's official language when the country was fully established in 1948 and now has seven million speakers.

Mention one romance language derived from latin