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In many many European languages the term for a thousand million is "milliard". English is the odd one out here.

[1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/milliard#Descendants

The word billion used to mean million million in the UK until the 70’s. The American meaning has become more common in the last half century.

Here's some backstory on the UK vs US treatment of that question.

https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/why-ar...

Oh cool, I didn't know the British used to do that as well!

It's English that's weird here. In most languages that have the word “billion”, the long scale is used.

As mentioned elsewhere - American English.

I would be very surprised if there's a currently spoken variety of English that doesn't use the short scale. British English switched many decades ago.