Revitalization

C) Read a short article about extinction of languages and answer the questions given below. Circle the correct answer.

To save a language from extinction isn't cheap - but more and more people are arguing that the alternative is the death of communities. 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. If a language has less than 100 speakers it is not likely to last long.

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. 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.

If good descriptions and material are available, even extinct languages can be resurrected. 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.

	Yes	No	Not given
The rate at which languages are becoming extinct has increased.
Research on the subject of language extinction began in the 1990s.
In order to survive, a language needs to be spoken by more than 100 people.
Certain parts of the world are more vulnerable than others to language extinction.

A literature review

A literature review is an account of what has been published on a topic by accredited scholars and researchers. This phase of research gives your scientific article some context, and it will help you to justify your statements. The objective of the literature review is to summarize the current state of knowledge in the area of investigation.

Read the second part of appendix 6 (p. 166-167) for more information about literature review.

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