Language quiz

Dear students, 

to encourage you to speak about languages in class, I thought it would be a very good idea to prepare a language quiz. This quiz is taken from the webpage : http://edl.ecml.at/, a site that I recommend you visit. Answer the questionnaire in pairs and decide which the best answer is and why. Then  have a look at the answers down below.

Answer these questions about languages. Comment them with your classmates.

1. How many languages are estimated to be indigenous in Europe ?
a) less than 100                     b) 100-200

c) 200-300                            d) 300-400

2. How many living languages are there in the world ?
a) around 500                    b) around 2000

c) around 4000                 d) around 6000

3. What is the most spoken language in the world ?

a) Chinese                         b) Hindi

c) English                          c) Arabic

4.  What proportion of all languages in the world are African languages?

a) one third                       b) half of all the languages

c) one fifth                        c) ten percent

5. Which of the following languages are written from right to left?

a) Hebrew                         b) Maltese

c) Japanese                       d) Arabic

6. Which of the following languages is considered to be the oldest language still used in Europe?
a) Galician                         b) Basque

c) Islandic                          d) Greek

7. In which of the following countries is German an official langauge ?

a) Liechestein            b) Switzerland       c) Austria

d) Belgium                 e) Luxembourg

Answers :  

1c, 2d, 3c, 4a, 5ad, 6b, 7abcde