re: #96 wheat-dogg, raker of forests, master of steam
I can foresee “different from” becoming a thing of the past, as “different than” is used more and more frequently. It’s the fluidity of language, and try as we teachers might, grammar rules are only descriptive, not proscriptive, in the larger sense.
Likewise, there are many examples of Chinese learners consistently changing English to make it conform to Chinese grammar. For example, they will say “I very like that,” instead of “I like that very much.” Given the sheer numbers of Chinese speakers of English, I can also foresee everyone around the world adopting that syntax within the next century.
Well, Wikipedia [citation needed] lists first and second language speakers as English first, then Mandarin second. Hindi takes the Bronze, followed by Spanish, then French.
For native speakers only, they list Mandarin first, then Spanish, then English. Hindi, Arabic (all), Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and Lahnda (all) round out the top ten.
We could wind up with Spanish syntax mixed with Mandarin (that would be odd).