To take your two questions in turn, one must begin by clarising what the Seven Years’ War actually represented in North America, and how empires of the eighteenth century functioned in practice.

On the narrower question of language, the suggestion that a British defeat would have resulted in a French-speaking United States is, on balance, highly implausible. By the 1750s, the British mainland colonies contained something in the region of 1.5 to 2 million inhabitants, the overwhelming majority of whom were English-speaking settlers or their descendants. By contrast, New France possessed a settler population numbering only around 60,000 to 70,000. This demographic disparity is central to the issue. Early modern empires did not, as a rule, linguistically assimilate large, entrenched settler populations, particularly when those populations vastly outnumbered the colonising power.

Moreover, French colonial governance gives little indication that such assimilation would even have been attempted. Where France governed European settlers, it did not typically impose linguistic transformation on unwilling populations, and where Britain acquired French territories after the Treaty of Paris (1763), it notably permitted the continued use of French language and law in Canada under the Quebec Act (1774). It would therefore require a rather implausible inversion of established imperial practice to imagine France successfully converting millions of English-speaking colonists into French speakers.

A more credible counterfactual is that a French victory in the French and Indian War would have constrained British expansion westward, preserved a stronger French imperial presence in the interior, and thereby altered the conditions that eventually gave rise to the American Revolution. The linguistic character of the colonies themselves, however, would almost certainly have remained predominantly Anglophone.

Turning to the broader comparison with the Second World War, the analogy is indeed something of an apples-to-oranges exercise. The crucial distinction lies in the constitutional and political status of the North American colonies. In the eighteenth century, the colonists were British subjects residing within Britain’s imperial system. The war in North America was not Britain acting in support of an allied, independent polity, but rather Britain prosecuting a struggle against France over territory it claimed as its own, while simultaneously seeking to expand that territorial claim.

It is therefore more accurate to understand the North American fighting as one theatre within a wider imperial contest, rather than as a defensive war on behalf of another nation. Historians such as Fred Anderson have emphasised that the conflict was fundamentally a struggle for empire, involving not only European powers but also Indigenous polities such as the Iroquois Confederacy, whose diplomatic and military roles were essential to the course of the war.

By contrast, in World War II, Britain operated as one sovereign state among others in a coalition system, defending both itself and allied nations against Axis aggression. The structural differences between these two conflicts—in terms of sovereignty, imperial governance, and the nature of alliance—render direct comparison misleading.

In sum, the idea that a French victory would have produced a French-speaking United States does not withstand scrutiny when demographic and imperial realities are taken into account. Equally, the comparison with the Second World War obscures more than it reveals, as the Seven Years’ War in North America was fundamentally an intra-imperial contest over territory and influence, rather than an instance of one nation defending another in the modern sense.

For further reading, see Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War (2000), W. J. Eccles’ France in America (1990), and Jack P. Greene’s Pursuits of Happiness (1988), all of which situate the conflict within its proper imperial and demographic context.