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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