How to Type with a Foreign Accent
<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>
<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>
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<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>
<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>
<p>To sound Russian, omit definite or indefinite articles.  &#8220;No, you cannot have cheeseburger.&#8221;</p>
<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>
<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>
