1272: Global Languages: English and French Jun 4, 2018

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There are two reason that while more than twice as many people speak Russian natively than French (254M to 118M), and likewise there are more than double the number of Chinese speakers—when including all dialects—to native English ones (1.4B to 547M) as of 2015, both English and French are considered more international than Russian and Chinese respectively. Of course there is nuance to this, Arabic, Russian, Hindi-Urdu and Chinese and to a lesser extend Spanish are lingua franca over large regions but not so global as English. This is changing as certain economies grow, but the fact that English and French are still official languages somewhere on 6 continents makes it more global, and will more often be the common denominator, so to speak. Moreover, although Chinese dialects may be a more common first language, English is still the most-commonly taught second language in the world, and French, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia, is close behind.
To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts. Check out the latest Youtube video out yesterday: https://youtu.be/tY6_zs7-k5I

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