EUROPEAN DAY OF LANGUAGES

EUROPEAN DAY OF LANGUAGES

1. With a partner ask and answer the questions below.

a) How many languages can you speak?

b) What foreign language(s) do you study?

c) Why do you think it is useful to speak another language?

d) What other language(s) would you like to speak? Why?

2. Look up the words in bold in a dictionary. Then read the interesting facts about languages.

Did you know that…

The European Day of Languages has been celebrated every year since 2001 on 26 September.

The aim of the day is to encourage people to learn more languages, at any age, in and out of school.

There are between 6000 and 7000 languages in the world – spoken by 7 billion people divided into 189 independent states.

Although most of the world’s languages are spoken in Asia and Africa, and China and India are the most populated countries in the world, English is still the most widely spoken language in the world.

Languages are in contact with each other all the time and affect each other in many ways: English borrowed words and expressions from many other languages in the past; now European languages are borrowing many words from English.

There are about 225 indigenous languages in Europe – about 3% of the world’s total.

Languages are related to each other like the members of a family. Most European languages belong to the large Indo-European family.

Most European languages belong to three broad groups: Germanic, Romance and Slavic.

Ukrainian belongs to the Slavic language group along with Russian, Belarusian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Bulgarian and others.

Most European languages use the Latin alphabet. Some Slavic languages use the Cyrillic alphabet.

Level B1-B2

SEPTEMBER

26TH

Ukrainian became the official state language of Ukraine in 1989.

There are some minority languages in Ukraine, for instance Karaim (a language spoken by a small ethnic group of Karaims living in Crimea), Plautdietsch (a dialect of German) and Mariupolitan Greek (a dialect of Greek spoken by ethnic Greeks living in Ukraine). Very few people speak them, they could disappear soon so they are endangered.

At least half of the world’s population are bilingual or plurilingual, it means they speak two or more languages. In Ukraine most people are bilingual – they can speak both Russian and Ukrainian, however, only one of the languages is their mother tongue. According to 2003 research, around 30 million people in Ukraine are Ukrainian native speakers.

3. Answer these questions.

a) How many languages are there in the world?

b) What is the most widely spoken language in the world?

c) How many indigenous languages are there in Europe?

d) To which language family does Ukrainian belong?

e) When did Ukrainian become the official state language?

f) How many native speakers of Ukrainian are there?

g) What is bilingualism?