Listen to the last part of the lecture and complete the

1 a) natural disaster
b) cultural assimilation
c) genocide
2a) The community must want to save the language.
b) Larger cultures should have respect for minority languages.
c) There needs to be a budget for courses, materials and teachers.
3a) It reduces the diversity of our planet.
b) When spoken languages die, they dont leave any signs of their presence in the world.
It is difficult to fulfil the three conditions mentioned in the lecture. It is rather difficult to make
the community where the language is dying understand why it is necessary to save their
language, as people are usually thinking about their own problems. Making people of larger
cultures understand how important it is to save dying languages is very hard as well as finding
money for courses, materials and teachers.
Languages, like people, are all different, but, unlike people, a language that has never been
written down leaves no signs of its presence in the world when it dies.
Tapescript (Lx. 2B, ЗА, 3B and 3C)

Part 1
David Crystal: A language dies only when the last person who speaks it dies. One day its there;
the next it is gone. Here is how it happens. In late 1995, a linguist, Bruce Connell, was doing some
field work in the Mambila region of Cameroon. He found a language called Kasabe, which no westerner
had studied before. It had just one speaker left, a man called Bogon. Connell had no time on that
visit to find out much about the language, so he decided to return to Cameroon a year later.
He arrived in mid-November, only to learn that Bogon had died on November 5.
Part 2
There is nothing unusual about a single language dying. Communities have come and gone
throughout history, taking their languages with them. But what is happening today is
extraordinary. It is language extinction on a massive scale. According to the best estimates,
there are now about 6000 languages in the world. Of these, about half arc going to die out
during the next century. This means that, on average, there is a language dying out
somewhere in the world every two weeks or so. Even a language with 100000 speakers is
not necessarily safe. It will not die next week or next year; but there is no guarantee that it will
still exist in a couple of generations time.
Part 3
Many things can kill a language, from natural disasters to cultural assimilations and genocide.
However, there are three conditions necessary for a language to survive: the community itself
must want to save its language; the larger culture of which it is a part needs to have a respect
for minority languages; there needs to be a budget for courses, materials and teachers.
Is language death such a disaster? Surely, you might say, it is simply a symptom of more people
willing to improve their lives by joining the modem world. So long as a few hundred or even a
couple of thousand languages survive, that is enough. No, it is not. We should care about dying
languages for the same reason that we care when a species of animal or plant dies. It reduces
the diversity of our planet, which is the key to our survival. In the case of language, we are talking
about intellectual and cultural diversity, not biological diversity, but the issues are the same.
Languages are like people, in one way, but in another way they are not like people at all.
When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, their archaeology. But
spoken language leaves no archaeology. For, when a language dies, which has never
been written down, it is as if it has never been.