According to the 2026 report of the International Organisation of La Francophonie, about 396 million people speak French worldwide, nearly 65% of them in Africa. And the trend is growing: the OIF projects close to 700 million French speakers by 2050, around 85% of them in Africa. The language's centre of gravity is no longer Paris, but somewhere between Kinshasa and Abidjan.
In Kuşköy, a mountain village in northern Turkey, people talk across valleys by whistling Turkish. A 2015 study showed that whistled Turkish draws on both hemispheres fairly evenly, whereas spoken Turkish relies mostly on the left. The physical form of the signal, it turns out, matters to the brain.
Speech has no gaps between words. In 1996, researchers played 8-month-old babies a continuous stream of made-up syllables for just two minutes. The infants picked out the 'words' by tracking which syllables tend to follow one another. That's probability calculation, done without a calculator or any visible effort.