A few days ago somebody online asked if people think I have an accent

[conuly]

This is a fairly common thing for autistics to have, a sort of developmental foreign accent syndrome, and I've got it too. (So, I think, does my mother, but she has an alternate explanation. Well, whatever the origin, she also is afflicted by people asking where she's from.) Interestingly, the further I get from NYC, the less people are likely to hear some strangely unidentifiable foreign accent in my speech.

Anyway, it's been a while since this came up in real life, but what do you know, just yesterday one of the people at the doctor's office asked when I was there with my mother!

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Comments

[fred_mouse]

Oh, the grammatical errors thing. I have an internal does-not-match-English grammar that is mostly suppressed, except when really tired. One of my uni friends delighted in it, because they were trying to develop the grammar (thingie - not lexicon) for it, as they were reasonably sure that it was internally consistent, just wrong. (think Yoda, but not quite).

[shehasathree]

I'm almost certain that it is internally consistent (or at least, has regular features). Most of the SEAsian kids in my primary school would have used similar grammar to each other, i think. (Obviously it's not stable, though, bc they're actively being taught and trying to learn Standard Australian English grammar at the same time.)

It's almost not-even-wrong, (from a linguistic descriptivist perspective), just... a non-standard variety, in a situation where there is a lot of social prestige attached to being able to use the standard form (at least in certain situations).

(Interesting parallel with the kinds of grammatical errors variants my grandparents and other German-speaking people of a similar age would make; also pretty consistent, iirc.)

[fred_mouse]

So what you have is a set of errors that are common to people who expect English to be more regular than it is? Not the kind of errors that children make, because they are working from a common base but don't have the nuances, but aspects like 'where does the 'the' go in this sentence' type errors?

[shehasathree]

I am so not the person to talk about this, really (I failed Second Language Learning and Teaching when i took it as my one "applied linguistics" subject, ugh) but: YES!

(Otoh, maybe i AM the a person to talk about this, bc i hated the discourse around second-language learning "errors" etc, which just seemed so judgemental and divorced from actual reality.)

The other week i found an entire book devoted to the kinds of errors that Russian-speakers make in English (and which form the basis for pop culture tropes of how people of Slavic linguistic backgrounds tend to speak in English)!

[fred_mouse]

That sounds like a really interesting book!

And yeah, the judgmental attitude that goes with any non-standard presentation of anything. One of the interesting things one of our developmental psych professors made us do was a kids IQ language test that was based on a different set of cultural/linguistic norms, for all that it was a version of English (I don't remember which one now). This was specifically aimed at trying to get us to understand that there are lots of reasons for not hitting certain skill levels in these tests, and that poor performance might just indicate cultural mismatch.