Why is English and French so different?
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Why is English and French so different?
The French and English languages are related in a sense, because French is a Romance language descended from Latin with German and English influences, while English is a Germanic language with Latin and French influences. Thus, they share some similarities, most notably the same alphabet and a number of true cognates.
What are the 2 most different languages?
Ethnologue (2021, 24th edition)
| Rank | Language | Family |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | English | Indo-European |
| 2 | Mandarin Chinese (incl. Standard Chinese, but excl. other varieties) | Sino-Tibetan |
| 3 | Hindi (excl. Urdu) | Indo-European |
| 4 | Spanish | Indo-European |
What language is furthest away from English?
These scores suggest a ranking of linguistic distance from English among these languages: Japanese being the most distant, followed by Mandarin, then French and then Afrikaans, Norwegian and Swedish as the least distant.
Why do English and French share so many words?
The reason for this is over 10,000 English words come from French. Many others come from Latin, the language from which French originated. This means that a significant number of English words have either exact French counterparts or very similar equivalents in French.
How is French grammar different from English grammar?
For the most part, French grammar follows the subject-verb-object word order as English does. And object and reflexive pronouns like “him,” “themselves” and “us” must come before the verb in many cases. But French can be a little more flexible, too, than English in the order of words in the sentence.
What differentiates English from other languages?
English is a non-tonal language. Thus it sounds very different from tone languages such Chinese or Vietnamese. In tone languages pitch is used to distinguish word meaning. So a word said with high pitch may have a different meaning than the same word said with a low pitch.
What is the difference between a single language and multiple languages?
Very different languages can share words (through borrowing) while different speakers of the “same” language may vary widely in their vocabulary due to factors of education or speaking style. Different languages may display the same sentence patterns, while a single language may display a great variety of patterns.
Where is the majority of the world’s French-speaking population?
The majority of the world’s French-speaking population lives in Africa. According to a 2018 estimate from the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, an estimated 141 million African people spread across 34 countries and territories can speak French as either a first or a second language.
What is the second most studied language in the world?
French is also the 18th most natively spoken language in the world, and is the second most studied language worldwide (with about 120 million current learners). As a result of French and Belgian colonialism from the 16th century onward, French was introduced to new territories in the Americas, Africa and Asia.
What is the second most widely spoken mother tongue in Europe?
French is the second most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union. Of Europeans who speak other languages natively, approximately one-fifth are able to speak French as a second language. French is the second most taught foreign language in the EU.