Saving Language IELTS Reading Answers with

Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS Reading Practice với passage Saving Language được lấy từ cuốn
sách IELTS Practice Test Plus 1 - Test 3 - Passage 3 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên
máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking, kèm list từ vựng IELTS cần học
trong bài đọc.

DOL IELTS Đình Lực 28/02/2022

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Bài đọc (reading passage )
SAVING LANGUAGE

For the first time, linguists have put a price on language . To save a language from extinction isn’t cheap
- but more and more people are arguing that the alternative is the death of communities

There is nothing unusual about a single language dying. Communities have come and gone throughout
history, and with them their language. But what is happening today is extraordinary, judged by the
standards of the past. It is language extinction on a massive scale. According to the best estimates, there
are some 6,000 languages in the world. Of these, about half are going to die out in the course of the next
century: that’s 3,000 languages in 1,200 months. On average, there is a language dying out somewhere in
the world every two weeks or so.
How do we know? In the course of the past two or three decades, linguists all over the world have been
gathering comparative data. If they find a language with just a few speakers left, and nobody is bothering
to pass the language on to the children, they conclude that language is bound to die out soon. And we
have to draw the same conclusion if a language has less than 100 speakers. It is not likely to last very
long. A 1999 survey shows that 97 per cent of the world’s languages are spoken by just four per cent of
the people.
It is too late to do anything to help many languages, where the speakers are too few or too old, and where
the community is too busy just trying to survive to care about their language. But many languages are not
in such a serious position. Often, where languages are seriously endangered, there are things that can be
done to give new life to them. It is called revitalisation.
Once a community realises that its language is in danger, it can start to introduce measures which can
genuinely revitalise. The community itself must want to save its language. The culture of which it is a part
must need to have a respect for minority languages. There needs to be funding, to support courses,
materials, and teachers. And there need to be linguists, to get on with the basic task of putting the
language down on paper. That’s the bottom line: getting the language documented - recorded, analysed,
written down. People must be able to read and write if they and their language are to have a future in an
increasingly computer- literate civilisation.
But can we save a few thousand languages, just like that? Yes, if the will and funding were available. It is
not cheap, getting linguists into the field, training local analysts, supporting the community with language
resources and teachers, compiling grammars and dictionaries, writing materials for use in schools. It takes
time, lots of it, to revitalise an endangered language. Conditions vary so much that it is difficult to
generalise, but a figure of $ 100,000 a year per language cannot be far from the truth. If we devoted that
amount of effort over three years for each of 3,000 languages, we would be talking about some $900
million.
There are some famous cases which illustrate what can be done. Welsh, alone among the Celtic
languages, is not only stopping its steady decline towards extinction but showing signs of real growth.
Two Language Acts protect the status of Welsh now, and its presence is increasingly in evidence
wherever you travel in Wales.

On the other side of the world, Maori in New Zealand has been maintained by a system of so- called
‘language nests’, first introduced in 1982 . These are organisations which provide children under five with
a domestic setting in which they are intensively exposed to the language. The staff are all Maori speakers
from the local community. The hope is that the children will keep their Maori skills alive after leaving the
nests, and that as they grow older they will in turn become role models to a new generation of young
children. There are cases like this all over the world. And when the reviving language is associated with a
degree of political autonomy, the growth can be especially striking, as shown by Faroese, spoken in the
Faroe Islands, after the islanders received a measure of autonomy from Denmark.
In Switzerland, Romansch was facing a difficult situation, spoken in five very different dialects, with small
and diminishing numbers, as young people left their community for work in the German-speaking cities.
The solution here was the creation in the 1980s of a unified written language for all these dialects.
Romansch Grischun, as it is now called, has official status in parts of Switzerland, and is being
increasingly used in spoken form on radio and television.
A language can be brought back from the very brink of extinction. The Ainu language of Japan, after many
years of neglect and repression, had reached a stage where there were only eight fluent speakers left, all
elderly. However, new government policies brought fresh attitudes and a positive interest in survival.
Several ‘semispeakers’ - people who had become unwilling to speak Ainu because of the negative
attitudes by Japanese speakers - were prompted to become active speakers again. There is fresh interest
now and the language is more publicly available than it has been for years.
If good descriptions and materials are available, even extinct languages can be resurrected. Kaurna, from
South Australia, is an example. This language had been extinct for about a century, but had been quite
well documented. So, when a strong movement grew for its revival, it was possible to reconstruct it. The
revised language is not the same as the original, of course. It lacks the range that the original had, and
much of the old vocabulary. But it can nonetheless act as a badge of present-day identity for its people.
And as long as people continue to value it as a true marker of their identity, and are prepared to keep
using it, it will develop new functions and new vocabulary, as any other living language would do.
It is too soon to predict the future of these revived languages, but in some parts of the world they are
attracting precisely the range of positive attitudes and grass roots support which are the preconditions for
language survival. In such unexpected but heart-warming ways might we see the grand total of languages
in the world minimally increased.
Câu hỏi (questions )
Question 1 - 5
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage Number

In following statements below, choose

YES if the statement agrees with the information

NO if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

1 The rate at which languages are becoming extinct has increased.

2 Research on the subject of language extinction began in the 1990s .

3 In order to survive, a language needs to be spoken by more than 100 people.

4 Certain parts of the world are more vulnerable than others to language extinction.

5 Saving language should be the major concern of any small community whose language is under
threat.

Question 6 - 8
The list below gives some of the factors that are necessary to assist the revitalisation of a language within a community.

Which THREE of the factors are mentioned by the writer of the text?

The list below gives some of the factors that are necessary to assist the revitalisation of a language
within a community . Which THREE of the factors are mentioned by the writer of the text?

A the existence of related languages

B support from the indigenous population

D on-the-spot help from language experts

E a range of speakers of different ages

F formal education procedures

G a common purpose for which the language is required

Question 9 - 13
Match the languages A-F with the statements below which describe how a language was saved.

Write your answers in boxes on your answer sheet.

List of Findings

A Welsh

B Maori

C Faroese

D Romansch

E Ainu

F Kaurna

9 The region in which the language was spoken gained increased independence.

10 People were encouraged to view the language with less prejudice.

11 Language immersion programmes were set up for sectors of the population.

12 A merger of different varieties of the language took place.

13 Written samples of the language permitted its revitalisation.

1 Yes Xem full giải thích

2 Not Given Xem full giải thích

3 Yes Xem full giải thích

4 Not Given Xem full giải thích

5 No Xem full giải thích

6 B Xem full giải thích

7 D Xem full giải thích

8 F Xem full giải thích

9 C Xem full giải thích

10 E Xem full giải thích

11 B Xem full giải thích

12 D Xem full giải thích

13 F Xem full giải thích

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