In this week's French Connections show, Florence Villeminot and Genie Godula continue to explore the long-term impact coronavirus is having on French society, starting with the language. According to the Académie française, the official guard dog of the French language, Covid-19 is feminine. What other new words and expressions have popped up in the wake of the pandemic? Meanwhile, as cafés and restaurants cautiously re-open, many French people are thrilled to return to a semblance of normalcy.

Hebrew lessons are in demand in the Gulf. Since the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the rapprochement deals with Israel last year, "Shalom" is now often heard on the streets of Dubai.

Tinubu at 69: Children use indigenous language in Jagaban drama

Emmanuel Macron's former prime minister Édouard Philippe is on a media blitz, prompting speculation he'll challenge Macron with a presidential bid in 2022. In the UK, The Times reports that a record number of people have been quietly stripped of their royal honours in the past decade, prompting calls for more transparency. In Quebec, a French truck driver has become the latest francophone to fail Quebec's notoriously difficult proficiency test. Finally, papers mourn the closing of Yahoo Answers, a "haven for the confused".

Cynthia Onwuchuruba Bryte-Chinule is a mathematics teacher in Port Harcourt and she teaches her students the subject in local languages, specifically Igbo and Nigerian pidgin.

"English is not my first language," writes Nakia Smith on her TikTok account, although the 22-year-old grew up in Texas. The young African-American woman has been deaf since birth, and uses her large following on the social media app to promote her little-known dialect: Black American Sign Language. In her video clips, she tells her 400,000 followers about the differences between her language and the standard American Sign Language (ASL).

These glasses translate speech into sign language.

This Thursday is International Day of Sign Languages. We take a closer look at the French sign language, more commonly known as LSF or "Langue des signes française", which was banned in France until 1977. Even though today only a minority of people master the language, it's developing little by little, even among non-deaf people. FRANCE 24's Éléonore Vanel, Erika Olavarria and James Vasina report.

Valentina Alexandre is a history teacher and tour guide in the United States. The young woman was born in Haiti and traveled to Benin to learn more about her ancestry.

North Africa's Jewish community does not exceed a few thousand people today. Waves of immigration over the past decades have led many of the region's Jews to Europe, especially France, where the majority of Jews hail from the Maghreb region. Most of them have lost their ancestors' mother tongue: Arabic. But today, some are seeking to learn this language, as a way of discovering their roots and their complex identity. FRANCE 24's Thameen Al-Kheetan and Sophian Aubin report.

Moscow has officially begun a "new phase" of its war in Ukraine, shifting its attention to the largely Russian-speaking Donbas. Prior to the February invasion, Russian proxies, who created pro-Moscow statelets, controlled around a third of the Donbas region. With striking prescience, novelist Andrey Kurkov explored the conflict from the perspective of a Ukrainian beekeeper who moves from the "grey zone" – the no-man’s-land between loyalist and separatist forces – to Crimea in his 2018 novel, "Grey Bees". He joined us for Perspective.

Even today, our Neanderthal genetic ancestry plays a surprising role in our immune response to COVID-19 — but not everyone carries Neanderthal genes. What if you do? Does that make a difference in the severity of COVID-19 if you catch it?