It’s odd that such a basic language construct would be the same across Spanish, Dutch, Arabic, Hebrew, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, French, Russian, Indonesian, German, Maldivian, Malay, Urdu, Punjabi, and Filipino and others.
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It’s not a word that evolved separately in different languages. It’s an English word that many other countries adopted.
It isn’t the same, most if not all of those languages have a different word. Even English hasn’t had “okay” or “OK” for that long, it appeared in the US in the 1830s.
In a lot of those languages, it’s not “native” and is a relatively recent though pervasive (to the extent that in some, you’ll find native speakers unaware it’s a) loanword.
Well, it’s not like those other languages just happened to come up with the same word. It’s an English word that just got popular enough to be used by speakers of many other languages. Linguists call this a loanword. We use lots of these in English. Pasta, cafe, kindergarten… These are all loanwords (from Italian, French, and German respectively).
That’s just…a false premise. “OK” is **recognised** for what it means worldwide, because English is the de facto language for conducting pretty much any kind of business internationally, so people who speak languages other than English gradually got used to it and decided to use it.
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