英語
(1)～(3)まで教えてください。
According to researchers from the University of Manchester, 90% of the world's language are ((1)) to disappear by 2050. One such tongue is Tofa, spoken by only about 60 people who keep reindeer on the empty land in Siberia. One of the researchers speaks the language, and says that he can speak fluently enough to be able to express anything he wants to say.
The researchers have been trying to keep records of endangered languages or videos. They have done fieldwork across the globe to investigate languages ranging from Faroese (50,000 speakers) to Banawa, one of 300 languages spoken in the Amazon basin. At a recent meeting, Yaron Matras, who speaks 13 languages, played a recording of a British Romani speaker made in the 1950s. He said that British Romani is now ((2)) at the level of extinction, and he is ((3)) looking for the alleged four or five families in Wales who still speak it.
There is no shortage of languages. At the last count there were about 6,000 , but only 4% of them are spoken by 96% of the people in the world. About 10 languages, including English, Arabic, and Hindi, are spoken by more than 100 million people each. No one needs to worry about them. But the little languages with little chance of survival need help. According to a professor at the University of Manchester, people are aware of threats to ecology and of species dying out, but they don't realize that we are leaving languages to die out. It is true that every languages is the repository of the culture of the people who speak it. When we lose the last speaker, we lose the people's cultural memory.
