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15 Passage 3 - Save Endangered Language Q27-40

1) Linguist Michael Krauss predicted in the 1990s that half of the world's 6,000 languages would cease to be spoken within a century unless efforts were made to stabilize declining languages. Other linguists had similar concerns about languages becoming extinct. 2) Despite awareness of the problem for over 10 years, the field of linguistics had accomplished little to systematically determine which languages could be saved or documented before disappearing. Funding for research grants was very limited. 3) Recently some foundations have provided millions of dollars in funding for projects to document endangered languages through field work and create an archive. A master-apprentice program in California also aims to revitalize indigenous languages, but its impact is small

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1K views7 pages

15 Passage 3 - Save Endangered Language Q27-40

1) Linguist Michael Krauss predicted in the 1990s that half of the world's 6,000 languages would cease to be spoken within a century unless efforts were made to stabilize declining languages. Other linguists had similar concerns about languages becoming extinct. 2) Despite awareness of the problem for over 10 years, the field of linguistics had accomplished little to systematically determine which languages could be saved or documented before disappearing. Funding for research grants was very limited. 3) Recently some foundations have provided millions of dollars in funding for projects to document endangered languages through field work and create an archive. A master-apprentice program in California also aims to revitalize indigenous languages, but its impact is small

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Cương Nguyễn Duy
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Passage 3 Save Endangered Language

SECTION 3
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40 which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.

Save Endangered Language


“Obviously we must do some serious rethinking of our priorities, lest linguistics go down
in history as the only science that presided obviously over the disappearance of 90
percent of the very field to which it is dedicated.” – Michael Krauss, “The World’s
Languages in Crisis”.
A
Ten years ago Michael Krauss sent a shudder through the discipline of linguistics with his
prediction that half the 6,000 or so languages spoken in the world would cease to be
uttered within a century. Unless scientists and community leaders directed a worldwide
effort to stabilize the decline of local languages, he warned, nine tenths of the linguistic
diversity of humankind would probably be doomed to extinction. Krauss’s prediction
was little more than an educated guess, but other respected linguists had been clanging
out similar alarms. Keneth L. Hale of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted in
the same journal issue that eight languages on which he had done fieldwork had since
passed into extinction. A 1990 survey in Australia found that 70 of the 90 surviving
Aboriginal languages were no longer used regularly by all age groups. The same was true
for all but 20 of the 175 Native American languages spoken or remembered in the US.,
Krauss told a congressional panel in 1992.
B
Many experts in the field mourn the loss of rare languages, for several reasons. To start,
there is scientific self-interest: some of the most basic questions in linguistics have to do
with the limits of human speech, which are far from fully explored. Many researchers
would like to know which structural elements of grammar and vocabulary – if any – are
truly universal and probably therefore hardwired into the human brain. Other scientists
try to reconstruct ancient migration patterns by comparing borrowed words that appear
in otherwise unrelated languages. In each of these cases, the wider the portfolio of
languages you study, the more likely you are to get the right answers.

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Passage 3 Save Endangered Language

C
Despite the near constant buzz in linguistics about endangered languages over the past
10 years, the field has accomplished depressingly little. “You would think that there
would be some organized response to this dire situation,” some attempt to determine
which language can be saved and which should be documented before they disappear,
says Sarah G. Thomason, a linguist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “But
there isn’t any such effort organized in the profession. It is only recently that it has
become fashionable enough to work on endangered languages.” Six years ago, recalls
Douglas H. Whalen of Yale University, “when I asked linguists who was raising money to
deal with these problems, I mostly got blank stares.” So Whalen and a few other
linguists founded the Endangered Languages Fund. In the five years to 2001 they were
able to collect only $80,000 for research grants. A similar foundation in England,
directed by Nicholas Ostler, has raised just $8,000 since 1995.
D
But there are encouraging signs that the field has turned a corner. The Volkswagen
Foundation, a German charity, just issued its second round of grants totaling more than
$2 million. It has created a multimedia archive at the Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands that can house recordings, grammars, dictionaries
and other data on endangered languages. To fill the archive, the foundation has
dispatched field linguists to document Aweti (100 or so speakers in Brazil), Ega (about
300 speakers in Ivory Coast), Waima’a (a few hundred speakers in East Timor), and a
dozen or so other languages unlikely to survive the century. The Ford Foundation has
also edged into the arena. Its contributions helped to reinvigorate a master-apprentice
program created in 1992 by Leanne Hinton of Berkeley and Native Americans worried
about the imminent demise of about 50 indigenous languages in California. Fluent
speakers receive $3,000 to teach a younger relative (who is also paid) their native
tongue through 360 hours of shared activities, spread over six months. So far about 5
teams have completed the program, Hinton says, transmitting a least some knowledge
of 25 languages. “It’s too early to call this language revitalization,” Hinton admits. “In
California the death rate of elderly speakers will always be greater than the recruitment
rate of young speakers. But at least we prolong the survival of the language.” That will
give linguists more time to record these tongues before they vanish.
E
But the master-apprentice approach hasn’t caught on outside the U.S., and Hinton’s
effort is a drop in the sea. At least 440 languages have been reduced to a mere handful

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Passage 3 Save Endangered Language

of elders, according to the Ethnologue, a catalogue of languages produced by the Dallas-


based group SIL International that comes closest to global coverage. For the vast
majority of these languages, there is little or no record of their grammar, vocabulary,
pronunciation or use in daily life. Even if a language has been fully documented, all that
remains once it vanishes from active use is a fossil skeleton, a scattering of features that
the scientist was lucky and astute enough to capture. Linguists may be able to sketch an
outline of the forgotten language and fix its place on the evolutionary tree, but little
more. “How did people start conversations and talk to babies? How dis husbands and
wives converse?” Hinton asks. “Those are the first things you want to learn when you
want to revitalize the language.”
F
But there is as yet no discipline of “conservation linguistics,” as there is for biology.
Almost every strategy tried so far has succeeded in some places but failed in others, and
there seems to be no way to predict with certainty what will work where. Twenty years
ago in New Zealand, Maori speakers set up “language nests,” in which preschoolers
were immersed in the native language. Additional Maori-only classes were added as the
children progressed through elementary and secondary school. A similar approach was
tried in Hawaii, with some success – the number of native speakers has stabilized at
1,000 or so, reports Joseph E. Grimes of SIL International, who is working on Oahu.
Students can now get instruction in Hawaiian all the way through university.
G
One factor that always seems to occur in the demise of a language is that the speakers
begin to have collective doubts about the usefulness of language loyalty. Once they start
regarding their own language as inferior to the majority language, people stop using it
for all situations. Kids pick up on the attitude and prefer the dominant language. In
many cases, people don’t notice until they suddenly realize that their kids never speak
the language, even at home. This is how Cornish and some dialects of Scottish Gaelic is
still only rarely used for daily home life in Ireland, 80 years after the republic was
founded with Irish as its first official language.
H
Linguists agree that ultimately, the answer to the problem of language extinction is
multilingualism. Even uneducated people can learn several languages, as long as they
start as children. Indeed, most people in the world speak more than one tongue, and in
places such as Cameroon (279 languages), Papua New Guinea (823) and India (387) it is
common to speak three of four distinct languages and a dialect or two as well. Most
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Passage 3 Save Endangered Language

Americans and Canadians, to the west of Quebec, have a gut reaction that anyone
speaking another language in front of them is committing an immoral act. You get the
same reaction in Australia and Russia. It is no coincidence that these are the areas
where languages are disappearing the fastest. The first step in saving dying languages is
to persuade the world’s majorities to allow the minorities among them to speak with
their own voices.

Questions 27-33
The reading passage has eight paragraphs, A-H
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-H from the list below.
Write the correct number, i-xi, in boxes 27-33 on your answer sheet.
List of headings
i data consistency needed for language
ii consensus on an initiative recommendation for saving dying out languages
iii positive gains for protection
iv minimum requirement for saving a language
v Potential threat to minority language
vi a period when there was absent of real effort made.
vii native language programs launched
viii Lack in confidence in young speakers as a negative factor
ix Practise in several developing countries
x Value of minority language to linguists.
xi government participation in language field

4
Passage 3 Save Endangered Language

27 Paragraph A
28 Paragraph B
Example: Paragraph C vi
29 Paragraph D
30 Paragraph E
31 Paragraph F
32 Paragraph G
33 Paragraph H

Questions 34-38
Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-F) with opinions or
deeds below.
Write the appropriate letters A-F in boxes 34-38 on your answer sheet.
A Nicholas Ostler
B Michael Krauss
C Joseph E. Grimes
D Sarah G. Thomason
E Keneth L. Hale
F Douglas H. Whalen

34 Reported language conservation practice in Hawaii


35 Predicted that many languages would disappear soon
36 Experienced process that languages die out personally
37 Raised language fund in England
38 Not enough effort on saving until recent work

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Passage 3 Save Endangered Language

Questions 39-40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in boxes 39-40 on your answer sheet.

39 What is real result of master-apprentice program sponsored by The Ford


Foundation?
A Teach children how to speak
B Revive some endangered languages in California
C postpone the dying date for some endangered languages
D Increase communication between students

40 What should majority language speakers do according to the last paragraph?


A They should teach their children endangered language in free lessons
B They should learn at least four languages
C They should now their loyalty to a dying language
D They should be more tolerant to minority language speaker

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Passage 3 Save Endangered Language

ANSWER

27. v
28. x
29. iii
30. i
31. vii
32. viii
33. ii
34. C
35. B
36. E
37. A
38. D
39. C
40. D

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