{"id":1058,"date":"2009-06-12T12:40:43","date_gmt":"2009-06-12T17:40:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1058"},"modified":"2009-06-12T12:42:06","modified_gmt":"2009-06-12T17:42:06","slug":"how-to-type-with-a-foreign-accent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1058","title":{"rendered":"How to Type with a Foreign Accent"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I spend a lot of time on IRC channels and discussion forums where many of the users are not native speakers of English.  Recently one of these expressed surprise when I observed: &#8220;You type with a foreign accent.  What is your birth language?&#8221; He knew, of course, about speaking English with an accent,  but he hadn&#8217;t encountered before the possibility that the same cues could be observable in written English.<\/p>\n<p>Herewith , some instructions on how to type with an accent.  All the examples I will give are utterances I have observed in the wild.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>To sound generally foreign, omit elisions and contractions normally used by native speakers.  Type &#8220;I do not think I have the time&#8221; rather than &#8220;I don&#8217;t think I have time&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>To sound German, put commas in places that do not correspond to speech pauses in English. &#8220;I do not know, how he could have believed that.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>To sound Russian, omit definite or indefinite articles.  &#8220;No, you cannot have cheeseburger.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>To sound like a speaker of Hindi or Urdu or one of the related languages, emit wordy run-on sentences that begin with &#8220;Esteemed sir&#8221;, like:  &#8220;Esteemed sir, I would be grateful if you could direct me towards a good book on Python because I am attempting to learn programming.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Understand, none of these errors actually interferes with comprehension.  I&#8217;ve found that these second-language speakers are often more worried about the quality of their English than they need to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I spend a lot of time on IRC channels and discussion forums where many of the users are not native speakers of English. Recently one of these expressed surprise when I observed: &#8220;You type with a foreign accent. What is your birth language?&#8221; He knew, of course, about speaking English with an accent, but he&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1058\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">How to Type with a Foreign Accent<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1058"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1060,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058\/revisions\/1060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}