Read the text and choose the correct answer. English is an international language spoken by an increasing number of people around the world. In many English-speaking countries, though, English isn’t the only language. In the UK, for example, people speak Welsh, Gaelic and a few other old languages. Because these languages aren’t international, people pay less attention to them. So, what does this mean for children who grow up speaking them as their mother tongue? I grew up in Wales. My family spoke English, but the Welsh language was everywhere. When you were driving around Wales, all the road signs were in English and Welsh. As a child, I hated reading everything twice! We had Welsh television programmes too. While everyone in England was watching fashionable American TV shows, we were learning about local farming in Welsh! At secondary school I was dreaming of going to live in Paris, when I realized that instead of Welsh lessons, I needed French lessons. No one spoke Welsh outside Wales. Now I feel differently. Welsh is a part of my identity and, besides, we have better Welsh TV now! In parts of Scotland, some children grow up in families where grandparents still speak Gaelic. Gaelic has even fewer speakers than Welsh, and few are confident that this part of their culture will survive. It’s difficult when English is everywhere else in the country, but teaching subjects in Gaelic in schools helps. However, often there aren’t enough Gaelic-speaking teachers. Unless families continue to speak the language at home too, these languages won’t survive. Between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct, nowadays, a third of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left. Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, 50 to 90 percent of them are predicted to disappear by the next century. Many old languages are disappearing in the UK. People on the Isle of Man spoke Manx for centuries until the last native speaker died in the twentieth century. The same thing happened to Cornish. There was a language spoken by smugglers who were bringing goods into the country illegally, or travellers and criminals. It allowed them to keep secrets from the police, but it too has disappeared. Languages, even if they are spoken by very few people, have a history and culture, and it’s a shame to see them go. When humanity loses a language, we also lose the potential for greater diversity in art, music, literature, and oral traditions. If we care about saving forests and animals, we should care about saving languages too.
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