Apartheid

Apartheid is an Afrikaans word, it is the name that South Africa’s white government applied to its policy of discrimination racial, political, and economic against the country’s non-white majority. Since the 1960s apartheid, which affected white relations with all non-European groups, has often been referred to as development.

Second languages

Most people speak only their first language the language learned in the home. But many also learn a second language. There are several kinds of second languages. One kind is the language of the other speaker. When a Basque speaker uses French to talk to a French speaker, for instance, he is using the other speaker’s language.

But sometimes speakers of different languages don’t use the language of the other speaker. They use a third language. Such a language is sometimes called a lingua franca. A speaker of Telugu from southern India and a speaker of Hindi from northern India may talk to each other in English. Then English is being used as a lingua franca.

Another kind of second language is a pidgin language. Pidgins are often used for brief contacts between people between two traders, say. A pidgin is a sort of hybrid of both the speakers’ languages. But the vocabulary is greatly reduced. And the way words fit together is greatly simplified. The first known Pidgin English was used by English speakers and American Indians. Russonorsk was a pidgin of Russian and Norwegian. It was used by Russian and Norwegian fishermen for about a hundred years before World War I. A pidgin of Dutch and Malay, known as Bazaar Malay, was used in the Dutch East Indies. Bazaar Indonesia, the official language of Indonesia, is based on Bazaar Malay.

Sometimes a pidgin becomes the first language of a group of speakers. Then it is a Creole language. In the Caribbean, African slaves from the same tribe were often separated. This was done to reduce the danger of revolt. So the slaves on a plantation had no common language. They could only talk to each other in a pidgin of their owner’s language such as Pidgin French or Pidgin Spanish. In time the slaves married and had children. The children learned the pidgin as their only language. At that point, their language was a Creole language. Louisiana Creole is a French-based language. Another French-based Creole is Haitian Creole, the language of Haiti. Speakers of Louisiana Creole and Haitian Creole commonly understand each other. Jamaican Creole is an English-based language of Jamaica. So-called Hawaiian Pidgin English is actually a Creole language. It is the speech of a large number of people brought up in the Hawaiian Islands.

Reading Comprehension Check

3. texts 1, 2 and 3 are about three different languages. Look quickly at them and decide what languages they are about. What do two of the languages have in common? Try not to take more than one minute.

4. Answer questions l – 4 by matching the number of people A – G with the languages they speak. There are three extra figures. What do the three extra figures refer to?

		is spoken regularly by	A	700,000
			B	l.2 billion
	Breton		C	800 million
	Frisian		D	200,000
	English		E	15 million
	Dutch		F	300,000
			G	2 million

1. complete sentences 5 – 8 with the endings H – N. There are three extra sentence endings.

		H	is the spiritual home of “world English”
		I	has the worst foreign language learning record
	Ireland	J	has the best foreign language learning record
	Portugal	K	has the lowest proportion of young people learning English
	Denmark	L	has the highest proportion of young people learning English
	America	M	is opposed to official recognition of minority languages
		N	is in favour of promoting English alone within the EC Lingua programme

2. What arguments does the author of Text 3 put forward to support the use of English as an international communication medium?

3. Do you agree with the point of view expressed in Text 3?

4. Do you sympathise with the people fighting to save minority languages?

5. Do you think the issues raised in Texts 1, 2 and 3 are contradictory or is it possible to both promote the spread of English as a universal language of communication and save the minority regional languages?

6. Read Text 4 and decide which of the statements below the author would agree with.

1. Life would be easier and travelling more enjoyable if everything was standardised.

2. It is small differences between countries which are interesting.

3. National identity and habits are extremely difficult to change.

4. Local habits are unlikely to change very much with the creation of a unified Europe.

5. The USA will always be one united country.

7. In the sentences below the author of Text 4 expresses her personal opinions by her choice of words. Underline the words which reveal her opinion, e.g. “I thought the Americans were just unbearably fussy, the way they obsessively rinse plates”. These words tell us that she does not approve of this American trait.

1. “... (the Dutch) prefer to wallow in margarine on top of the stove”.

2. “A continental chemist may austerely sell nothing but drugs”.

3. “Our flat traditional Sunday of churchgoing and inertia has just about had it”.

4. “... the only pity is that they didn’t legalise proper shopping before car-boot sales turned half the nation into fences for stolen goods”.

5. “... a German Sunday, when you not only can’t shop, you can’t even wash your car lest the swooshing of your hose disturbs your neighbours”.

8. The writer also expresses her opinions in a more direct way, e.g. “It is the small things which make the interesting differences between countries, and there are far more of them than ever appear at the level of diplomatic meetings and grand hotels”. Find other examples of clearly stated opinions in Text 4.

9. For questions 1 – 5 complete sentences about national characters with one of the endings A – H. There are three extra sentence endings.

		A	have a very efficient medical system
		B	do not celebrate birthdays
	The Dutch	C	like fried food
	The French	D	live in single-storey, concrete houses
	The Greeks	E	are not very respectful of Sunday
	Dutch	F	avoid paying property taxes
	Germans	G	grill everything they eat
		H	do very little on Sundays

10. Decide whether the statements below are true or false in the context of Text 4.

1. In Britain it is bad manners to put your hands on the table when you are eating.

2. The Greeks are bad builders.

3. Americans only eat hamburgers and pizza.

4. The Finnish national dish is meat parties.

5. You have to tip Italian nurses.

6. The Spanish use kettles to heat their water.

7. In the USA you can have a snack at the chemist’s.

8. The Turks celebrate name days.

9. Italian children receive their Christmas presents on Christmas Eve.

10. The British go shopping on Sundays.

11. Some texts are heavily biased and present only the writer’s views on a particular topic – texts written in the first person may often be of this type. Others are more objective presenting facts and quoting or presenting other people’s views. But hardly any texts are completely objective: a writer always reveals something about his or her views, either explicitly or by the way he or she chooses to write about a topic. A writer may use phrases like “My guess is”; “What matters is”; “I now see it as”, “I believe”, etc. In this case, interpreting the writer’s opinions is straightforward. Alternatively, a writer may use a number of less obvious ways of expressing his or her news, such as the choice of words, e.g. “The remarkable resilience of nationality…”. In this sentence, the word “remarkable” reveals the author’s view of national resilience. The way an author chooses to describe or discuss something, e.g. the use of exaggeration or irony to attract the reader’s attention or to mock. Which Texts (1, 2, 3 and 4) are the most/least objective? Which of the following categories of text type would you say Texts 1, 2, 3 and 4 belong to (informational, opinion, imaginative, descriptive)?