yet another reason to hate the fr*nch 🤢

whenever you see an English word and none of the letters make sense

that just about describes half the English vocabulary

C'est la vie

Déjà vu

Honestly, the original question was a good one. That snarky reply in the original picture was pretty douchey. There's a lot of interesting history behind linguistics.

That's one of my all time favourite South park episodes.

Getting the local Chinese restauranteur to build the city wall... because the Chinese are good at building walls.

I recently saw a tiktok (therefore I'm an expert) that showed that Old French was pronounced pretty much exactly how it was spelled.

Every language simplifies it's pronunciation over time, but usually they alter the spelling when they do, but French just said "miss me with that shit, dog" and decided just to change the rules about pronunciation instead

Being racist to the Gauls I see

How could you say something so controversial yet so true?

kunoese nuts

Bilinguals aren't impressive at all. I think most people are bilinguals. Apparently, according to Journal of Neurolinguistics, we have more bilinguals (43 percent of the world population) rather than monolinguals (40 percent).

There are trilingual regions in my country. And one neighbouring country is mostly trilingual too(2 official languages + 1 foreign)

Well nobody can objectively force something to impress you or not impress you. But most people speak more than one language natively or on a regular basis, hell just short of 2 billion people (1/4 the world's population) alone are from the Indian subcontinent region, and there the high variation/diversity of languages throughout the region make speaking 3-4 languages well the norm.

Similar story with Indonesia/Papua New Guinea. And most people in Central Asia and many European parts of the former USSR speak Russian as a 2nd language (nearly all Kazakhs, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and most Baltic people speak Russian to a high fluency, while also often speaking a 2nd and sometimes 3rd native language).

Then you consider language in European countries like the Netherlands (Dutch/English), Belgium (French/Dutch/English), Sweden (Swedish/English), Finland (Finnish/Swedish), Denmark & Norway (Denmark or Norwegian / some obscure highly derived dialect that's different enough from the standard and common languages to be counted), Spain (Castillian/some other Spanish language), Italy (Standard Italian/some other Italian language). I'd say at least a third of Europeans speak more than one language natively and two thirds can speak more than one language well at all.

Despite being a massive continent, one thing that can be said about almost all of the socities there is that most of them are polylingual. Probably less so in Arabic-speaking majority countries.

Really, monolingualism is only the norm for anglo countries – especially the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand. Not so much in like half of Canada. I think it could be said that monolingualism is the norm in most of China too, but I'm not so sure about that. AFAIK it's pretty mixed in Latin America but overall a majority of the people there speak only Spanish or Portuguese, save for places like Peru & Uruguay.

The last time the Mongolians decided to expand their horizons, it didn't work out so well for a decent chunk of the rest of the world. I think it's perfectly fine they choose to keep things simple, tbh.

And the 'S'. And to be fair, the 'OU' could have just been a 'U'. Also, the 'E' could have been an 'A'.

Randevu.

But sometimes words in English have silent Zs like in the word "rendezvous".

Monolingoloid