Endangered Languages

15 Points Per Correct Answer - No time limit  

1. Which of the following is NOT necessarily a characteristic of an endangered language? Only a few elderly speakers of the language remain alive. It is spoken by people who live in isolated areas. The language is no longer being taught to children. The language is regarded as socially inferior and/or has no monolingual speakers.

2. 96% of the world's 6800 languages are spoken by only 4% of its people. True False

3. Which of the following is a major cause of language loss? Westernization and the rise of global communication Population movement, especially urbanization All of these War and discrimination

4. One-fourth to one-third of the world's languages lack orthography. What is that? A written language A distinct culture Stories and folktales The support of the government of the countries in which they are primarily spoken

5. Which of the following statements about the world's languages is FALSE? It is estimated that about 50 of the world's languages are spoken by only one person. Australia has dozens of endangered languages. Half of all the world's languages occur in only eight of its countries. Europe has no endangered languages.

6. According to ethnologue.com's list of nearly extinct languages, these four countries have the greatest number of moribund languages in the Americas. Which country has the most, by twice as many? The United States of America Canada Brazil Peru

7. Creoles and pidgin languages are generally not included when linguists discuss endangered languages. True False

8. An example of a language on its way to extinction is Ainu, which once had 19 dialects and now has only about 15 speakers. The Ainu people have been almost completely integrated into the culture and language of which country? Japan Suriname Australia Cameroon

9. Which of the following languages has NOT shown a large increase in the number of people speaking it in the past hundred years? Irish Gaelic Hawaiian Manx Hebrew

10. There is hope for endangered languages. All over the world, scholars and ordinary people are working to preserve both languages and the cultures they represent. Which of the following organizations is creating an online database (with word lists) of all the world's known languages? SIL UNESCO The Rosetta Project UNICEF