6 Minute English / Saving dead languages

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I m Neil.

And I m Phil. And now that we ve done our hellos, let s hear some greetings in different languages from around the world. But what do these languages have in common?

I'm afraid I don't know what they have in common because I don't recognise any of them.

Well, sadly the one thing uniting these languages is that they re all endangered. We often hear about animals at risk of extinction, but a recent study by the Australian National University found that out of the world s 7000 existing languages, half are under threat.

But what can be done to save languages from dying out? That s what we ll be discussing in this programme, and, as usual, we ll be learning some useful new vocabulary as well.

But first I have a question for you, Phil, and it s about a country which used to be one of the most linguistically rich places on Earth, Australia. Before European settlers arrived in the 1800s, Australia had over 200 languages spoken by the native Aboriginal people who had lived there for thousands of years. Many Aboriginal languages were destroyed by the brutal laws of the Australian government at the time, however some survived. So, which of the following Aboriginal languages is still spoken today?

Is it:

a) Djinang?

b) Alawa?