IELTS Reading: language passages
How languages develop, spread and disappear, and how we learn and use them.
22 passages mainly about language · 39 more that touch on it · from 55 full tests
Passages mainly about language
Each passage opens as a timed 20-minute practice with its 13–14 questions. Submit to see your band estimate and the sentence that proves every answer.
- Does Speaking Two Languages Make You Smarter?
- When a Language Falls Silent
- Faces on the Page
- The Life Cycle of Slang
- When a Dialect Falls Silent
- Should English Spelling Be Reformed?
- A Code Under the Fingers
- Ears or Eyes: The Audiobook Question
- The Language in Your Pocket
- The Alphabet the Phoenicians Carried
- Reading the Hand of the Past
- Should Endangered Languages Be Protected?
- The Long Journey of Ten Signs
- Reading the Wedge-Shaped Signs
- Can Tourism Help Keep Minority Languages Alive?
- King Sejong and the Making of Hangul
- The Book Nobody Can Read
- Why Accents Keep Changing
- Where Words Come From
- Reading Between the Lines
- Hands That Talk: Gesture and Speech
- How New Sign Languages Emerge
Other passages that cover language
These passages have a different main subject but deal with language along the way.
39 passages
- Page Versus Screen
- What the Machine Cannot Read
- The Inca Roads and the Knots That Counted
- The Case for Reading for Pleasure
- The Long History of the Encyclopaedia
- The Stone That Unlocked Egypt
- Will AI Replace Human Translators?
- Making Machines Listen
- Teaching a Machine to Read
- What a Language Model Actually Does
- Should Historic Place Names Be Restored?
- Heraldry and the Language of Coats of Arms
- Should Historical Texts Be Modernised for Students?
- The Book of Kells
- The Making and Use of Papyrus
- A Dead Language in a Living Curriculum
- The House of Wisdom
- Is the Idea of the 'Dark Ages' Misleading?
- The Decipherment of Linear B
- Writing on Wax
- History's Two Audiences
- The Knots That Kept the Accounts
- Should Historians Still Use the Word 'Civilisation'?
- The Archive in Clay
- The Library of Ashurbanipal
- Should War Diaries Be Taught Alongside Official Histories?
- Can Museum Objects Tell Stories Without Labels?
- The Two Stages of Roman Justice
- Should Experts Check What We Read About Health?
- Why We Recognise Faces but Forget Names
- How Children Learn to Read
- How Rumours Spread
- Starting Early
- How We Read Emotions in Voices
- Degrees in a Foreign Language
- Why Children Have Imaginary Friends
- How Children Learn to Lie
- The Books of the Maya
- The Disc That Refuses to Speak
Key language vocabulary
Words worth knowing before you read about language, each with the sentence it appears in.
| Word | Meaning | Example from a passage |
|---|---|---|
| prestige noun | the respect and importance that people attach to something | “The second argument concerns prestige. Many minority languages carry a history of official disapproval” Test 409 |
| misrepresentation noun | the act of describing something in a false or misleading way | “Where a culture is itself the product, misrepresentation becomes a commercial temptation.” Test 409 |
| immersion noun | a teaching method in which learners are surrounded by the language all day | “Hawaiian was brought back chiefly through immersion schools” Test 409 |
| dependent adjective | unable to continue without the help or support of something else | “whether a community can use their interest without becoming dependent on it” Test 409 |
| supplement noun | something added to another thing in order to support or improve it | “tourism is a supplement to language policy, not a substitute for it” Test 409 |
| morphemes noun | the smallest units of meaning in a language | “Chinese characters represent morphemes, not sounds” Test 426 |
| articulation noun | the production of speech sounds by movement of the mouth and throat | “pictures of the lips, tongue, teeth and throat in the act of articulation” Test 426 |
| featural adjective | describing a writing system in which the shapes of letters reflect the sounds they represent | “This principle, later called featural writing, is unusual among the world's scripts” Test 426 |
| petition noun | a formal written request made by a group of people | “submitted a petition against the new alphabet” Test 426 |
| vernacular adjective | using the ordinary language of a country rather than a scholarly or foreign language | “a separate vernacular script would mark the country as barbarous” Test 426 |
| vellum noun | fine parchment made from animal skin, used for writing or printing on | “it consists of around 240 pages of vellum, many of them bearing careful drawings of plants” Test 432 |
| parchment noun | a writing material made from the skin of an animal, used for pages of old books | “The results pointed to parchment made between about 1404 and 1438” Test 432 |
| uniform adjective | staying the same in character or pattern throughout | “The text is also remarkably uniform: the same statistical patterns appear in the botanical pages and in the recipes” Test 432 |
| disposed of phrase | showed an idea or claim to be false, so ending its influence | “The finding disposed of a popular theory that the manuscript had been produced by the thirteenth-century English friar Roger Bacon.” Test 432 |
| stubborn adjective | refusing to give way; difficult to overcome or explain | “Its stubborn resistance is, in a sense, the point.” Test 432 |
| encroach verb | move gradually into space that belongs to something else | “it may encroach on the space occupied by its neighbour” Test 449 |
| constellation noun | a group of related things of the same kind | “Australian English has its own constellation of changes, and although the two varieties began” Test 449 |
| allegiance noun | loyalty to a person, group or cause | “driven as much by social allegiance as by any internal pressure” Test 449 |
| exaggerating verb | making a sound or feature stronger or more noticeable than usual | “found that younger islanders were exaggerating a vowel sound in words such as 'house'” Test 449 |
| displacements noun | movements of things out of their usual positions | “other vowels have since followed it in a stately sequence of displacements” Test 449 |
| contested adjective | argued about because people do not agree on it | “Quite how borrowing works remains contested. Linguists can describe what happened to a word” Test 467 |
| hybrid noun | a word formed from parts taken from two different languages | “a fourth is the hybrid, part native and part borrowed, of which English has thousands” Test 467 |
| displaced verb | pushed out and replaced by something newer or stronger | “English acquired thousands of French words, many of which displaced native ones” Test 467 |
| recurrent adjective | happening again and again over a period of time | “but public anxiety about it is real and recurrent” Test 467 |
Question types in these passages
- Multiple choice · 28 passages
- Yes / No / Not Given · 21 passages
- Summary completion (word list) · 14 passages
- Matching sentence endings · 13 passages
- True / False / Not Given · 13 passages
- Multiple choice (choose more than one) · 13 passages
- Summary completion · 11 passages
- Matching headings · 11 passages
- Flow-chart completion · 9 passages
- Matching information · 9 passages
- Table completion · 8 passages
- Matching features · 8 passages
- Sentence completion · 5 passages
- Short-answer questions · 4 passages
- Note completion · 4 passages