Very often the pronunciation, tone, pitch give a non-native speaker away.

@ZEPHYRA What about written English?

Well. As far as written English, you can tell if they are American or English by ways we talk,or spell. English spell color colour sometimes.
Or when someone calls Americans “yankees.” No southerner I know (no matter how progressive, or liberal) would tolerate being called a Yankee.

With spoken English it’s much easier for me to tell if it isn’t someone’s first language.

What’s amusing to me is that English is,for many Americans (especially in the south,) a person’s first/only language. But they certainly don’t speak “proper” English…

It’s much harder in written English than spoken since you have more time to prepare your thoughts. It’s is still fairly common though. English is hard!

@Stinley It actually is, more than it seems at the first glance.
@MrGrimm888 British and Americans are both native English speakers. I refer to non-native speakers. like me, for example

I do really admire non- native speaker who are practically fluent but I can tell within milliseconds if someone if non-native. It’s pronunciation, intonation, construction, or just slightly off idioms. The few that I know are perfect speakers have all been Scandinavian. I wonder if their speech patterns are similar to English.

The stereotypical way to imitate an Eastern European immigrant is to drop the articles – “You bring car, we go to restaurant.”

@Call_Me_Jay Heh, figures, we don’t have articles. I’ve always struggled with articles, never knew which one to use. I probably mess it up even now without noticing.

Ich never notiz das,

@ragingloli Do you notice it when someone speaks German? I mean, as a native German speaker.

@Sneki95 It’s very subtle things and one can’t necessarily generalize about what they are. For example, where you wrote “I refer to” we would usually write “I am referring to” or “I was referring to”.

@Sneki95
Oh, totally. You can “hear” their effort to pronounce the words, whereas a native speaker just does it.

Pronunciation of vowels will often reveal if they learned their English on the European continent or North America, or even the Antipodes. Pronunciation of certain consonant constructions will place them as to approximately where on the European continent they come from.

Certain words such as boot for trunk, lift for elevator, queue for line, lorry for truck, loo for toilet, will do that as well—if they use the first word in each example will tell you that they more than likely learned their English on the continent. As stated above, multisyllable words will give them away as to which syllable they emphasize.

People with mother tongues in Germanic languages often have a problem with prepositions and prepositional phrase placement in sentences.

People from some Slavic languages, such as Czechs will have problems with gender, especially giving gender to inanimate objects. Some Poles and Polynesians have problems with tense. All Slavics and Germanics will sometimes have problems pronouncing “V“as “W” and “W” as “V” in English.

Haitians cannot properly pronounce the herb perejil, or parsley in Spanish. When Dominican Republic closed it’s border to Haitian migrant workers in DR—many Haitians could mimic DR Spanish perfectly except for that one word—and border guards would simply ask any suspected Haitians to pronounce perejil properly and when they couldn’t they were shot in situ. It was known as the Parsley Massacre, or Parsely War.

Scandinavians often make the mistake of mispronouncing the English word “Union” when casually reading it as “Onion”. LOL.

Spaniards can place certain Latin Americans by the way they pronounce their S’s. Spaniards, Cubans and a few New Worlders pronouernce it properly with a lisp, as in Cathtille, instead of Castille. Others, like Mexicans pronounce the S like an S. Same with the double “L” construction. Some pronounce Caballo as Cabayo, and still others pronounce it as Cabajho, with a soft “j” sound. Then there is the name ””, pronounced variously with an almost gutteral sound in the back of the throat for the J, in other places they pronounce it Zhwahn, and still others as Whan. Spanish-speaking people are very good at identifying where other Spanish-speaking people come from.

These things slip out in even the best linguists when they are fatigued or have been drinking.

@Sneki95 . I think your English is pretty good. Better than what some where I live could write.

EC. Yeah. L’s are a giveaway sometimes. Depending on the person’s original language. Some Asians seem to have issues with R’s, and L’s,as far as pronunciation. Makes me think that I would struggle with their language. Most foreign languages sound beautiful to me though…

I can only notice if the non-native comes from a country with a language way too different from English. European languages at least has some similarity to English and Europeans at least have similar language logic to English native speakers. But then again it’s just because I’m an Asian and I’m more familiar to Asian language logic, unless the speaker is really, really good.

I would have thought you were a native speaker if you hadn’t told me where you come from @Sneki95, but I think people here have already noticed I’m not a native speaker from very early.

Sometimes non-native speakers will mess up an idiom, substituting a synonym for a particular word. I can’t think of an example just now.

I would not guess anyone here learned English as a second language. Your written English is excellent.

Sure.

a lot of Hispanics get a form of the past tense wrong. They say I did went to the store instead of I did go to the store. Understandable mistake.

I agree with Jellies above that R and L can be a giveaway.

Some ESL people get “the” wrong. They use it or don’t use it when it shouldn’t or should be there respectively.

Obviously, some accents give it away, even when grammar is perfect.

Sometimes the person isn’t ESL, but just raised in a different part of the US. I say half an hour, while other people say half hour. I say ten of six, while other people say ten too six, and don’t know The of means it’s 5:50. When their accent is very very American the assumption is another part of America rather than foreign. That can be an incorrect assumption.

It usually doesn’t take long with conversational English. Accents and mixing idioms ring in your ear.

Yes, they have an accent

^^Not necessarily. Go to Europe and you will meet people from many European countries who speak perfect English with a perfect upper-class British accent, just like their British ESL teachers. These people are invariably well educated from excellent schools who have musical ears, just as a Russian opera singer will sing Italian opera in a perfect Italian accent, or a girl from Ho Chi Minh City sings Motown lyrics in a perfect American Black Southern accent.

I spoke Swedish in a slight Slavic accent because I felt it sounded better than the Stockholm accent. I also liked to roll my R’s because I didn’t like my American Midwestern/Southwestern hard R and I saw it as a chance to get rid of it. Most Swedes thought I was Polish. LOL. And it was very good for giving orders as an officer aboard merchant Swedish ships.