Paulina Klavina is not very interested in the events of the 20th century. She holds no views on nationalism. She has always been bored by crusades and movements. But more than most people in the world today, Pauline Klavina lives with the feeling that she is part of history. That is because at the age of 80, Mrs. Klavina is one of the last Livonians. When she dies she will take to her grave much of a
heritage that has been alive for 5,000 years. It is hard to imagine now, looking into her fading eyes, that
her people, the Livonians, once ruled the icy seas around the Baltic countries, which included, more than a millennium ago, lands from Finland through what is now Estonia and Latvia.

“There are at least four of us left”, she said, referring to people who consider Livonian their native language. “There may be more. I like to think we will all make it past the year 2000, into one more era. But I prefer not to think about the end”. Yet, even she knows that the end is near. Languages depend, of course, on the vitality of the people who speak them. And in this era of superpowers, computers, the global village and economic integration, languages are vanishing at a rate that has never been matched. More than 6,000 languages are spoken in the world today, but linguists say that within a generation at least half of them will be gone. Some of them believe that, linguistically, the world is getting very small, and these cultures are the victims. In fact, more powerful languages have disappeared as normal means of communication. Think of Latin. Latin speakers once ruled the Western world. So, who should care about the disappearance of the moribund fishing culture of the Livonians? Mrs. Klavina certainly feels her own isolation. She says that sometimes even she loses the ability to talk in her native language. Since her husband died 30 years ago, the opportunities for casual conversation are few. But she still dreams in Livonian, she insists.

PART ONE: READING COMPREHENSION

1. Answer the following questions without copying from the text.

a) What makes Paulina Klavina feel nostalgic about the past?

b) What is the situation of the languages of the world according to the linguists mentioned in the text?

c) Why is Mrs. Klavina no longer fluent in her own language?

  PART TWO: WRITING
Choose ONE. Write about either 1 or 2.

Option A: Suppose that on the night of her 80th birthday Mrs. Klavina dreamt she was talking to her late husband. She tried to tell him about her present life in Latvia. Write down this imaginary dialogue between Paulina Klavina and her husband.

Option B: : Write a composition expressing your views about “The future of minority
languages in Spain”.

3. Vocabulary

Explain next words in English, write the phonetics and also an example: event, fading, to vanish, means.