The uvular r's of French and the fricative, glottal ch's of German (and Scots) are essential to one's imagination of these languages and their speakers.
North American tribal customs feature “two-spirit” people who combined male and female attributes (anthropologists call these “berdache”, from a French word for catamite).
She tried to talk to him, partly by signs, partly in pidgin French, which, for some reason, she thought would be more comprehensible to him, and she had half a dozen phrases of English.
According to the analysis of more than two thousand states' secondary schools, the number of students taking exams such as French and German at the age of sixteen has dropped by almost half in that time.
The Nazi soldiers, they never suspected her, because she just looked like every other housewife in the country, and she could speak fluent French without a hint of her Australian accent.