Possibly confusion by someone who's used to the long scale? In Danish, as in most non-English European languages, the cognate of "billion" means trillion (10^12).
Like with metrication us Brits adopted it slowly so there were many years of seeing either usage. This wasn't confusing at all. :)
"miljoen" -> "miljard" -> "biljoen" -> "biljard" -> "triljoen"
^6 -> ^9 -> ^12 -> ^15 -> ^18
However, a lot of Afrikaans-speaking people use the de facto English convention. The newspapers usually get it right though, in contrast to this article.
i dont think that's true
Here is a handy list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Long_sca...
The UK is the only place in Europe where "billion" means 10^9; in Eastern European languages, there simply isn't an equivalent word, and everywhere else it means 10^12.