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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 2, The Mother Tongue.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Robert McCrum was Editor-in-Chief of what publishing house from 1979-1996?
(a) Penguin.
(b) Faber and Faber.
(c) Simon and Schuster.
(d) Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald.

2. Northern Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands produced their own language tree that divided into what and German?
(a) Celtic.
(b) Norse.
(c) Welsh.
(d) English.

3. Robert McCrum writes in the Introduction, "Language, we know, is in ceaseless ____."
(a) Love.
(b) Flux.
(c) Motion.
(d) Flow.

4. What do the authors claim denote information about a speaker's life and career and explain community values?
(a) Vocabularies.
(b) Languages.
(c) Accents.
(d) Styles.

5. The Anglo-Saxon language received a major boost when Christianity brought an enormous Latin vocabulary starting in what year?
(a) 238 A.D.
(b) 597 A.D.
(c) 359 A.D.
(d) 283 B.C.

Short Answer Questions

1. How many novels has Robert MacNeil written, according to the Introduction?

2. Who is listed as the Executive Producer of the television series The Story of English?

3. Linguists know that languages spoken by around how much of humanity came from a common Indo-European source?

4. When did the Romans withdraw from Britain?

5. What is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common?

(see the answer key)

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