CONTRACTIONS are one of my favorite parts of the English language. I was wondering, though, how common are they? As an effective uniglot, I have very limited expertise in the subject of non-English languages, but I do know that English and French have contractions. What about other languages? Chinese? Xhosa? Serbo-Croatian? Please email me if you know. This will also be a useful exercise in figuring out who reads this thing.