It’s cool how you can pick up someone’s “accent” online in that way. A spoken accent is often a dead giveaway if you have some idea of the phonology of their n

It’s cool how you can pick up someone’s “accent” online in that way. A spoken accent is often a dead giveaway if you have some idea of the phonology of their native language. The way a lot of people learn the sounds of a foreign language in the first place is by “transliterating” them to their native language—so they never quite pick up the foreign sounds exactly, just the nearest approximation from their native array of sounds. But even if you can’t hear them, the mistakes and idiosyncrasies of their writing are going to be influenced by their native language as well, in fairly predictable ways. Of course now that I’m trying to think of examples, I can’t recall any. :P