Business mogul, Elon Musk, has lived in multiple countries throughout his life, one of them being Canada. Canada is one of the many countries known to have two official languages; English and French. We know he speaks English, but does Elon Musk speak French?
No Elon doesn’t speak French – usually when it comes to Elon and stats he’s in a small percentage, towards the top. But, when it comes to languages, he’s in the smaller portion of the population, on the bottom end. 40% of the world’s population can only speak one language, Musk included.
Some people argue that there’s no need to learn another language when you’re native tongue is English, since the majority of the world operates on English anyhow. Americans are higher than the global average when it comes to only speaking one language, 75% aren’t fluent in a second language.
Monolingual Stats
There are many studies showing a range of how many people are monolingual, or can only speak one language, in the world. Some have the number as low as 25%, though many agree that it is somewhere around 40%.
Several countries around the world have more than one official language, which is why the number of polyglots, or people who speak more than one language, is so high. At the other end of the spectrum you have the United States and Mexico, neither of whom have an official language, though they each have their own popular language.
Of the 75% of Americans who only speak in their native tongue, 80% of them only speak English. American English, especially in written terms, is different than British English, with the most obvious differences being the difference in using s vs. z in some words, such as civilization, and dropping the u in words such as behavior and neighbor.
Many Americans, in addition to other prominent English countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, feel there’s no need to learn another language, as most of the various aspects of the business world all speak English.
Learning French
There are so many opportunities to learn French these days. You can sign up for an online course, check some children’s books out from the library and teach yourself, or visit everyone’s favorite free learning site, YouTube.
There may be plenty of opportunities out there, but Musk is so busy, how could he possibly take the time to learn? Well, there are plenty of tutorials out there where you only need a few minutes a day, and I’m pretty sure that even the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX could find the time.
French in North America
French is the fourth most popular spoken language in the United States, yet only about 2.1% of the population can speak it. It is not a wide-spread language and is mostly found in Louisiana and some areas along the North East coast of the country, close to Canada. Quebec and New Brunswick have large populations of French-speaking citizens, so it’s quite normal to see areas that border those provinces speak French.
Another province in Canada that speaks French is, Nova Scotia. Many French-Canadians had traveled to the United States in the early 1700s, and when the Expulsion of the Acadians occurred in Nova Scotia, starting in 1755, many of them headed south, to live with relatives. We now know this area as Louisiana, and Acadians became Creole, in addition to slaves brought from Haiti.
Programming Languages
If Linguists recognized various computer programming languages then Elon Musk would definitely be a polyglot as he has full comprehension of multiple computing languages. He was able to teach himself a 6-month course on BASIC in 72 hours. When he was ten. Since that time in the early 1980s he’s gone on to learn other computing languages such as Python and C/C++.
Sometimes One is Enough
Only being able to speak one language fluently hasn’t seemed to slow Musk down at all. He’s constantly traveling the globe and experiencing new things, his businesses are booming, and he just became a Dad again, with his partner delivering the baby boy on May 5, 2020.