Model answer
Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
Q: Why do some languages disappear?
A: Usually it's not that a language stops working, it's that the community speaking it stops passing it to the next generation, often because a bigger, more economically useful language offers obvious advantages — better jobs, wider communication, access to education. Parents make a completely rational choice to prioritise that dominant language for their children, and the smaller one quietly becomes the language of grandparents rather than the language of daily life. Once a generation grows up without full fluency, the loss compounds quickly, because a language needs a critical mass of active speakers to keep evolving rather than just being remembered.
Q: Should everyone learn a second language?
A: I think "should" is doing a lot of work in that question, because the value of a second language depends heavily on someone's actual life — someone in a monolingual region with no plans to travel gets a different return than someone in a multilingual city. That said, I'd still lean toward yes in general, not purely for practical use, but because learning another language forces you to notice things about your own that you'd never otherwise question — why English structures a sentence the way it does, for instance. So even if the practical payoff varies, the cognitive payoff is fairly consistent.
Q: Will English remain the global language?
A: For the medium term, almost certainly, just because of the sheer weight of existing infrastructure built around it — academic publishing, aviation, a huge share of the internet. But I wouldn't assume that's permanent; dominance like that has shifted before, and it tends to follow economic and political power rather than any quality of the language itself. So my honest guess is that English stays dominant for longer than people predicting its decline expect, but probably not indefinitely.
Q: Does losing a language mean losing a way of thinking?
A: To some extent, yes — languages don't just label the world differently, they sometimes carve it up differently, with concepts or distinctions that don't translate cleanly into another tongue. When a language disappears, some of those specific ways of noticing the world go with it, at least in that undiluted form. I'd stop short of saying the thinking itself becomes impossible without the language, though, because people are clearly capable of holding complex ideas across languages — it's more that something is lost in convenience and nuance, even if the underlying thought could theoretically be reconstructed another way.
Q: Is technology making it less necessary to learn other languages?
A: In the narrow, transactional sense, yes — translation tools have genuinely closed a lot of the practical gap; you can order food or read a sign in a language you don't speak far more easily than a decade ago. But I don't think that touches the deeper reasons people learn languages, which are usually about relationships, culture, or actually thinking in a different framework rather than just getting information across. So technology has probably reduced the urgency for casual, functional use, while leaving the case for genuinely learning a language largely untouched.