1. A news story.
Read a news story about a language at risk of extinction and then choose the most appropriate title for the story.
(Choose the best story title below.)
Manuel Segovia is one of the last surviving speakers of Ayapaneco. Ayapaneco is an indigenous language that has been spoken for centuries in the land now known as Mexico, a land that has seen the conquest of the Spanish, wars, revolutions, floods and famines. Ayapaneco has managed to survive all this, but now, like many other indigenous languages, Ayapaneco is now at serious risk of extinction.
Manuel Segovia still speaks Ayapaneco to his wife and son. They can understand him, but they only speak a few words of it themselves. In fact, there is just one other living person who can speak Ayapaneco fluently: Isidro Velazquez. However, Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, refuse to speak to each other despite living a mere 500 metres apart, or perhaps it's because of this.
The two last living speakers of Ayapaneco live in the village of Ayapa in the southeastern Mexican state of Tabasco, in the Gulf of Mexico. Whether or not it is familiarity or proximity that breeds contempt, or some long-held argument or grudge, according to the opinion of the people of the village, Segovia and Velazquez have never enjoyed each other's company.
Linguistic anthropologist Daniel Suslak of Indiana University agrees that the two have little in common. Suslak is involved in a project which aims to produce a dictionary of Ayapaneco. The dictionary forms an important part of a race against time to save and revitalise the language before it's too late. If these efforts fail, Ayapaneco could well die out with the passing of Segovia and Velazquez.
The beginning of the end for Ayapaneco came with the advent of education in Spanish in the mid-20th century. For several decades it was explicitly prohibited for indigenous children to speak anything else. This was followed by urbanisation and then migration in the 1970s, all of which effectively provoked the break-up of the core group of Ayapeneco speakers. According to Suslak, the language has, in a way, always been a "linguistic island" surrounded by much stronger indigenous languages. He believes that it is a miracle that it has survived as long as this, and points out that its disappearance would be a great loss, as it is rich in sound symbolic expressions, often inspired by nature, along with many cultural references.
In Mexico there are some 68 different indigenous languages, which can be divided into 364 variations. Ayapaneco is not alone in the danger of extinction stakes, though it is possibly at the top of the list. The name Ayapaneco is itself an imposition from outside. Segovia and Velazquez call the language Nuumte Oote, which means "True Voice". However, these two remaining speakers beg to differ over many of the details behind the language and its history, which hasn't helped their relationship. The dictionary, due for release later this year, will contain both of their versions of the story.
Past efforts have been made to save this language, but many of these failed due to lack of funding and the diminishing enthusiasm of participants, where classes would start off full, but soon pupils would stop attending them. In spite of this, the National Indigenous Language Institute is planning one last attempt at holding classes with the hope of enabling the last two surviving speakers of Nuumte Oote to pass on their knowledge to other locals and the next generation.
2. A news story.
Can you remember the main information in the story? Choose the correct options to complete the sentences.
4. Fact file: Ayapaneco.
Read part of a fact file on Ayapaneco and choose the options that best fit.
5. Language death.
Read information from Wikipedia about language death. Choose the option that best summarises each section. (Text from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death.)
6. Meaning in context.
Choose the best meaning for the underlined words.
Language death
In linguistics, language death (also language extinction or linguistic extinction, and rarely linguicide or glottophagy) is a process that affects speech communities where the level of linguistic competence that speakers possess of a given language variety is decreased, eventually resulting in no native and/or fluent speakers of the variety. Language death may affect any language idiom, including dialects and languages. Language death should not be confused with language attrition (also called language loss), which describes the loss of proficiency in a language at the individual level.
The most common process leading to language death is one in which a community of speakers of one language becomes bilingual in another language, and gradually shifts allegiance to the second language until they cease to use their original (or heritage) language. This is a process of assimilation which may be voluntary or may be forced upon a population. Speakers of some languages, particularly regional or minority languages, may decide to abandon them based on economic or utilitarian grounds, in favour of languages regarded as having greater utility or prestige. This process is gradual and can occur from either bottom to top or top to bottom.
Languages with a small, geographically isolated population of speakers can also die when their speakers are wiped out by genocide, disease or natural disaster. A language is often declared to be dead even before the last native speaker of the language has died. If there are only a few elderly speakers of a language remaining, and they no longer use that language for communication, then the language is effectively dead. A language that has reached such a reduced stage of use is generally considered moribund. Once a language is no longer a native language – that is, if no children are being socialised into it as their primary language – the process of transmission is ended and the language itself will not survive past the current generation. This is rarely a sudden event, but rather a slow process of each generation learning less and less of the language, until its use is relegated to the domain of tradition, such as in poetry and song. Typically the transmission of the language from adults to children becomes more and more restricted, to the final setting that adults speaking the language will raise children who never acquire fluency. One example of this process reaching its conclusion is that of the Dalmatian language.