English Recordings

Hello my name's Rachel Davis.
I’m 15 years old.
I was born on March 2nd, 2005.
I’m American.
I live in Saratoga, California.
My father's name is Philip. He's 48 and he is a bank manager.
My mother’s name is Carla. She’s 45 and she is a nurse.
I have one brother and one sister
My brother’s name is Mike. He is 21 and he works in a fast-food restaurant.
My sister’s name is Bella. She is 19. She is a student of medicine.
I’m in year 11. Later I’d like to work in an international company or to be an air hostess.
Actually I like foreign languages: French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese.
I also like cooking pastries and watching series.
I dislike vegetables, spiders and getting up early.
On weekends I play tennis or go swimming. I sometimes go to parties with my friends and I also spend a lot of time on TikTok.

Native speakers of these languages range in number from very large, with hundreds of millions of speakers, to very small, with fewer than 10 speakers. The most popular language in the world is Chinese. More than one billion people in the world speak Chinese.
Interestingly, English has fewer native speakers than Chinese, but there are about one billion learners of English all around the world. They learn English as an international language. About fifty percent of the world’s languages have fewer than 5000 speakers. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, 204 languages had fewer than 10 speakers and 344 languages had between 10 and 99 speakers. The 548 languages with fewer than 99 speakers make up nearly 8 percent of the world’s languages. We call them ‘endangered languages’. As the speakers of such languages grow old and die, their
languages will die, too. All languages are really valuable, despite their differences. Every language is an amazing means of communication that meets the needs of its own speakers. It is impossible to imagine the world without language. Therefore, we should respect all languages, no matter how different they are and how many speakers they have.

I served the tennis player Tina Sherwood with lots of fruit and vegetables in a shop in Wimbledon during the tennis tournament one year. The players used to come in and buy huge amounts of stuff to keep them going. She bought so much. She was paying by credit card. I suppose she thought she didn't have to sign the slip because she was so famous, but I made her do it. She looked quite taken aback at the time, but after that, whenever I saw her in the street, she'd stop me to ask how I was. I could be wrong but I reckon she realised that, no matter how famous you are, there are still rules that apply to everyone.

I was a hotel receptionist and Lenny Grade, the film producer, came rushing in one night to say he had a very important meeting in the morning. He was quite worked up about it and kept stressing how vital it was that he had an 8 o’clock alarm call. At the time I remember finding him quite patronising, because he felt he must keep repeating his request as if I was an idiot. I was doing an overnight shift and, to cut a long story short, I was having coffee before heading home, when there was a commotion by the lift, and he came sprinting past swearing. I looked at my watch and it was 9.15 – it had totally slipped my mind to wake him up.