西电研究生英语视听说UNIT 1.ppt

01 UNIT 1 Daily Communication Section A Warming Up Lead-in questions 1.How many languages are there all over the world? 2.Which language is likely to be the global language?why? 3.What body languages do you often use in face-to-face communication? 1.The actual number of languages spoken in the world is difficult to calculate. One of the problems is that of the definition of what constitutes a language. This leads to the following range in answers: According to the National Virtual Translation Center(NVTC), there are about 6,900 languages in the world. The Ethnologue(民族语) organizations current catalog includes 6,809 distinct languages. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language says that estimates of total living languages in the world vary from 3,000 to 10,000. Voegelins Classification and Index of the Worlds Languages (1977) lists 20,000 languages and dialects, grouped into about 4,500 living languages. No exact figure exists, and we are losing languages every year, as only living speakers die. But a good estimate is about 6,800 languages, according to the Linguistic Society of America. Some further questions 1. Why are there so many different languages in the world? 2.It is not necessarily these small languages that are about to disappear,why? 3.Why do people reject the languages of their parents? 4.Language is also intimately bound with culture,why? 5.English as a global language,pros and cons? 1. Why are there so many different languages in the world? Isolation breeds linguistic diversity:as a result, the world is peppered with languages spoken by only a few people.Only 250 languages have more than a million speakers,and at least 3,000 have fewer than 2,500. 2.It is not necessarily these small languages that are about to disappear,why? What makes a language endangered is not just the number of speakers, but how old they are.If it is spoken by children it is relatively safe.The critically endangered languages are those that are only spoken by the elderly. 3.Why do