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IELTS Practice Listening: Note/Summary Completion Diagram
ID: #57400
Hard
Range languages
Instructions
Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer.
Complete the diagram below.
Transcript:
You will hear a lecture about the decline of the world's languages and the impact this has on cultures and communities. Now listen carefully and answer the questions. Good afternoon, everybody. Today, in the first lecture on anthropology, we're going to look at languages and how they are disappearing fast and what effect that's having on people and the world as a whole. We hear so much in the news about the possible extinction of animal and plant species in the world. It's a sad thing that one day certain animals will cease to exist. But how many of you are aware that the world's languages are facing a similar threat? Believe it or not, there are currently more than 6,000 languages spoken in the world today, but experts believe that by the end of this century, this number will be reduced to half. And as each language dies, the culture and specialised knowledge of a community dies with it. The unique knowledge of the environment, local wildlife, plants, animals, and ecosystems, not to mention the cultural traditions of the people themselves, will become lost forever. In essence, each language is not just spoken or written words strung together, language has the power to hold the entire history of a people. Approximately one language dies every two weeks. This is an unprecedented situation. Never before in history has there been this rate of rapid decline. Most human languages are spoken by relatively very few people. Let's put this into perspective. The Ethnologue, the leading authority on the world's languages, has put together a list of every living language known to man. There are over 6,500, of which 6,000 have available population figures. Now, 109 million people speak just 10 of these languages, and they are the major languages of the world. At the opposite end of the scale, there are minority languages which are only spoken by a few people, and that's what this chart is illustrating. The number of languages is represented on the vertical axis, and the total number of languages that make up this group is an astounding 1,619. For each of these smaller language groups, the population range of speakers goes from 1 to 999. Even more incredible is the fact that out of these small languages, over 200 of them have a speaker population ranging from just 1 to 9. Imagine only nine people speaking your language in the whole world, or even only one or two people. Now, let's think geographically. In total, there are 516 languages that are nearly extinct, where only a few members of the older generation survive. When they die, the language will die with them, lost forever. The majority of nearly extinct languages come from the Pacific and the Americas, making up 74%, followed by Asia at 15%. Europe has the smallest percentage of languages that are nearly extinct, only 2%.
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