Understanding and analysing languages with different grammatical systems is a major challenge, but by identifying formal grammatical categories and exploring their common meanings, as linguist Frank Palmer suggests, it is possible to uncover cross-linguistic patterns. This paper undertakes a contrastive and descriptive study of the modal verb ‘can’ in three languages: French, English and Kiwahili. The aim is to examine, through illustrative examples, how different languages operate within different linguistic frameworks to convey concepts of comparable semantics. Particular attention will be paid to the peculiarities of English modal verbs, including subject-auxiliary inversion, ellipsis and direct not-negation.