Language survey

A language survey is conducted around the world for a variety of reasons.

• Measuring people's ability to speak and understand another language (usually community based, not school based) (multilingualism)
• studying people's attitudes about different languages (Rensch 1993)
• evaluating the differences and similarities in speech of communities that speak related speech forms, noting comprehension or collecting details of linguistic form (dialectology)
• assessing the vitality of languages that may be disappearing (language death)
• doing initial descriptions of languages in areas that are linguistically undescribed