While I get your wider point, I find the different types of mistakes that ESL'ers with different mother tongues make absolutely fascinating.
I've noticed, say, that in Poland, where the native tongue lacks articles, people regularly mess up "the" and "a," or miss them altogether. I've never met a French person with the same issue, for obvious reasons.
When I started looking into people's mistakes with tenses in English - dear god, so much about my native tongue that I had no idea about, and yet made particular nationality error combinations really stand out. It's crazy fun.
Edit: and I love my eldest's progress with English. While she's basically a bilingual preschooler, she tends to speak English with polish word order: I like cars red. Her natural instinct is to also use the polish rules for nouns when choosing he/she/it. It's an absolutely fascinating process I feel privileged to observe.
Interestingly, that word order is also valid English, though it has a slightly different meaning than "I like red cars".
Example: "I like [my] soup warm".
"I like soup warm, but you can eat it cold and left over if you want."
"I like having soup warm"
"I like my cookies freshly baked"
"I like men muscular and toned"
"I like my women blonde, so you can go for the brunette"
"I like cars red" doesn't quite work as well but doesn't seem wrong. Add a little context and it seems more normal. "As a buyer of many sports cars, I like my cars red, even despite the speeding tickets I get".
Perhaps a linguist could explain how this phrasing works.
(That said, of course I advocate teaching her to speak fluently and to use that word order only when she intends its subtlety of meaning.)
Ehhhh... not often quite set in stone enough that you can rely on it, especially for spoken language. Emphasis and a whole host of other situations lean towards - but by no means demand - order in the example given.
Another angle I haven't heard is that they are just having a bit of fun for the lulz: They know their adversaries can (fabricate) attribute with or without obfuscation (cyber war signalling style). So they bring it over the top with some cold war 80s action movie dialogue. It serves no other function than to taunt and confuse and hear some American housewives on Twitter go: I dunno, sounds Russian to me!
The full effect seems to be a thread of 200+ comments talking about the language in the release, sentence-for-sentence, and many (un)witting agents pouring over the contents of the files.
Perhaps, besides the fun of imagining someone having to explain to McCain what a "double dutch rudder" is, the language serves a higher purpose of increasing virality and impact.
> It would be very weird for anyone to make assumptions about their identity based on broken english.
They could be haven trying to disguise themselves, maybe fearing a grammatical analysis or somehow exposing some fingerprint in how they construct sentences.
And as throwaway claimed, if you speak both English and Russian (I do), and have heard many others who speak both English and Russian for a many years you start to pick up patterns and understand when someone is speaking with a fake-make-it-sound-Russian style.
I've noticed, say, that in Poland, where the native tongue lacks articles, people regularly mess up "the" and "a," or miss them altogether. I've never met a French person with the same issue, for obvious reasons.
When I started looking into people's mistakes with tenses in English - dear god, so much about my native tongue that I had no idea about, and yet made particular nationality error combinations really stand out. It's crazy fun.
Edit: and I love my eldest's progress with English. While she's basically a bilingual preschooler, she tends to speak English with polish word order: I like cars red. Her natural instinct is to also use the polish rules for nouns when choosing he/she/it. It's an absolutely fascinating process I feel privileged to observe.