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

[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.