“Le français devient la quatrième langue la plus parlée au monde”

• Anglais: plus d’1,5 milliard de locuteurs
• Mandarin: plus d'un milliard
• Espagnol: plus de 600 millions
• Français: 396 millions (près de 65% sur le continent africain)

“En 2050, le français devrait être utilisé par 590 millions de personnes, dont 9 sur 10 vivront en Afrique.”

https://www.franceinfo.fr/culture/patrimoine/le-francais-devient-la-4e-langue-la-plus-parlee-au-monde_7874840.html

#français

The #English verb “prepone” (the opposite of “postpone”) is widely used in India: https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/12awbk3/prepone_the_opposite_of_postpone/

However, it’s not common elsewhere—e.g., it’s not in the Merriam-Webster dictionary of American English.

“Classical Chinese in modern China”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWhaFG31GJM

Roughly: Classical Chinese = Latin, Mandarin = Spanish. For a long time, virtually all Chinese writing was classical. Only in the early 20th century did people start to write down spoken Chinese in books, official documents, etc.

Classical Chinese survives in “chengyus” (short phrases that often consist of 4 characters—a common format in Classical Chinese). It is still often used for signage and movie titles.

#Chinese

#Chinese grammar is often described as easy – compared to, say, German because it doesn’t have inflection (*). But I’m not sure that’s true: There are so many ways to move words around, verb complements, structural patterns, etc. Decoding those is a matter of incremental learning but being proficient at producing them seems much more difficult.

(*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection

This man from Cork (Ireland) sounds Jamaican
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSOSEqyevnk

More information: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/04/viral-speech-ireland-thomas-gould-colonial-history-caribbean-english

#English