Vocabulary and grammar: The English language

VLanguage

1Complete the sentences with the words in the box. 

MOVE
• foreign
• slang
• dialect
• accent
• official
• fluent

• 1The inhabitants of South Africa have got eleven different   languages, recognized by the government. Only 10% speak English at home, but 23% speak Zulu.

• 2In Sweden, people speak Swedish as their native language, but 90% of the population learn and speak English as a   language.

• 3In Northern Ireland, most people speak a   of English which has got different words to Standard English. For example, aye means yes and lug means ear.

• 4On the island of Malta in the Mediterranean, over 80% of the population are   English speakers. Malta used to be a British colony, so people there speak English very well.

• 5There are only fifty kilometres between the cities of Manchester and Liverpool in England, but people in each city have got a very different  . They use the same words, but pronounce them very differently.

• 6There are a lot of   words in Australian English, including bludger, which means 'a lazy person', and hard yakka, which means 'hard work'.

Second conditional

2Write second conditional sentences about some of the minority languages in Europe. 

You need to use normal letters and capital letters correctly in this task. You also need to use correct punctuation.

Language	Number of speakers
Catalan	10 million
Romansch	60,000
Faroese	70,000
Frisian	350,000
Scottish Gaelic	60,000
Basque	700,000

• 1if I / come from Barcelona, / I / speak Catalan

• 2Susie / understand Romansch / if she / live in the Engadine valley in Switzerland

• 3if we / decide to live in the Faroe Islands, / we / have to learn Faroese

• 4if they / have a house on the coast of Holland, / they / know a few words of the Frisian dialect

• 5you / learn Gaelic / if you / go to school on the northern islands of Scotland

• 6if I / know how to speak Basque, / I / go to the Basque country in the north of Spain

 I wish …

3Rewrite the sentences to say how the people would like the present situation to be different. 

You need to use normal letters and capital letters correctly in this task.

• 1I don't speak Welsh.

  I wish .

• 2Tom has a strong accent.

  Tom wishes .

• 3Claire isn't learning a foreign language at school.

  Claire wishes .

• 4I don't have a dictionary.

  I wish .

• 5Penny and Simon aren't native French speakers.

  They wish .

• 6I have to translate this essay into Spanish.

  I wish .

I wish …

4Choose the correct words. 

If you 

¹livedwould live

 

on the Isle of Man, an island in the middle of the sea between England and Ireland, you 

²heardwould hear

 

some people speaking Manx. It's a Gaelic language which is similar to the Gaelic that some people speak in parts of Ireland. Today, everybody on the Isle of Man speaks English as their first language. If they 

³didn't understandwouldn't understand

 

English, they 

⁴weren't ablewouldn't be able

 

to communicate or get a job. However, there are about a hundred people who are also fluent in Manx. All of them have learned it as a second language. The last native speaker was Ned Maddrell. When he died in 1974, thousands of years of history ended. I wish he 

⁵werewould be

 

alive today. I 

⁶lovedwould love

 

to hear how he pronounces the old Manx words. However, if you 

⁷wantedwould want

 

to be a Manx speaker today, you 

⁸didn't havewouldn't have

 

any problems practising the language. There are radio stations, apps, websites and books in Manx, and people often meet up to have conversations in Manx.

5  Do you wish you spoke another language, apart from your language and English? Which of the languages below would you choose to learn? Say why and what you would be able to do if you were a fluent speaker. Speak for no longer than one minute. Latin Chinese sign language Piraha ( a language of the Amazonian tribespeople)

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