Well they do speak French

And English!

But (almost) no German. The most spoken (native) language in Europe.

According to Wikipedia (and unsurprisingly), that's technically Russian. Western Europe, perhaps?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_...

Thanks for correction. I was under the assumption Russian was second.

wow, I did not know that!

other fun fact I learned from wikipedia - "German-Americans make up the largest self-reported ancestry group within the United States accounting for roughly 49 million people and approximately 17% of the population of the US"

They for sure do, they spell a lot of words different as they use the French spelling. Like neighbour and favour.

I literally can't tell how much you're joking. There's nothing French about the spelling of these contemporary English words, even though they have norman roots.

I didn't know english and french were only a single letter apart in some cases. Is there a common root of some kind?

Very basic words in english (eg water, man, milk, drink) tend to have Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) roots whereas newer more abstract words tend to have come in after the 1066 Norman Conquest, with French words eclipsing their Anglo-Saxon equivalents, as the Norman aristocracy supplanted the Anglo-Saxon rulers.

> Is there a common root of some kind?

Yes, the common root is french, as in "Normans" :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normans

One of the neat linguistic things still in English from the Norman conquest - the word for the meat in English (which is traced back to German) is often the word for the animal in French.

Meat from cattle is beef. Steer in French is beof ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/beef : From Middle English beef, bef, beof, borrowed from Anglo-Norman beof, Old French buef, boef (“ox”) )

Meat from a chicken is poultry. Chicken is poulet in French. ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poultry : From Middle English pultrie, from Old French pouleterie, from poulet, diminutive of poule (“hen”), from Latin pullus (“chick”). )

Meat from a swine is pork. The word for swine in French is porc. ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pork From Middle English pork, porc, via Anglo-Norman, from Old French porc (“swine, hog, pig; pork”), from Latin porcus (“domestic hog, pig”).)

This is because when the normans (who were the rulers at the time) wanted poulet on the table, they didn't want a live chicken - they wanted a cooked chicken and so the word the meat and the animal diverged in English.

There are also some interesting Spanish / Arabic word pairs from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_Spain where the word in Spanish differs from the romance side of the family tree.

Meat from a chicken is chicken. The class of edible animals to which chickens belong, and the general term for their meat, is poultry.

I've never considered it the french spelling. It's the british english spelling: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

US tends to drop the u's in a lot of words. It doesn't make the original word french.

That said, a lot of english words do come from french. In fact, the english word favour came from the old french favor, apparently?

c. 1300, "attractiveness, beauty, charm" (archaic), from Old French favor "a favor; approval, praise; applause; partiality" (13c., Modern French faveur), from Latin favorem (nominative favor) "good will, inclination, partiality, support," coined by Cicero from stem of favere "to show kindness to," from PIE *ghow-e- "to honor, revere, worship" (cognate: Old Norse ga "to heed").