[yodsanklai]

I think English is peculiar in the sense that tons of people use it as a second language, and there are also many local variants that sound quite different. As a result, I feel that English is a more flexible language than let say French.

I wonder how often English native speakers here on HN feel that some comments aren't clear or odd-sounding due to approximative English. It's something I barely have experience of in my native language, as there are comparatively fewer foreigner speakers. And when reading HN comments, I'm mostly incapable of guessing the origin of the commenter (with a few exceptions).

[munificent]

I can definitely recognize the writing styles of non-native speakers and can sometimes guess their primary language by the way they write. For example, Russian speakers tend to omit articles before nouns and speakers of romance languages often prefer Latin-derived words which also exist in English over more common Germanic words because those words transliterate easily from their language.

I love it. It helps some of their culture and personality show up in their writing. It reminds me how diverse and varied the world is, and what a delight it is that we can come together on the Internet.

[nkrisc]

For precisely the reason you stated - loads of non-native English speakers for all over the world - you just get used to it. I’m so used to “broken” English that’s it just not really a big deal. I know what they meant. Drop all the articles and don’t conjugate verbs for all care (many verbs don’t even change in most tenses anyway), it rarely makes a difference. And if I’m not sure I’ll ask.

English is flexible, adaptive, and with a rich vocabulary. In my experience is pretty hard to not be understood, no matter how poor your English. Don’t know what something is called? Just put two words together, I’m sure it’ll be good enough to be understood.

[notahacker]

Not just the non-native speakers, but also multiple strands of native speakers (and big regional differences even within native-speaking country, and significant grammar and word choice variation as well as pronunciation differences), no official "correct" version and a certain amount of cultural resentment even within Britain to RP which was intended to be an official version.

And of course English is a very irregular language, with stuff like articles being irrelevant to the vast majority of sentences, and some of the complexities like conjugations conveying very little meaning (as you say, verbs often don't change during tenses; think there are more irregularities with common words than actual shades of meaning conveyed by conjugating them), and many of the common "corrections" like objections to split infinitives actually being based on misconceptions

Actually, I think the prevalence of ESL speakers will eventually result in "standard" English variants on native-speaking TV losing quirks like nonstandard pluralisation and even articles, and it'll be much the better for it.

[grecy]

> As a result, I feel that English is a more flexible language than let say French

French is only stuffy and inflexible in France.

Travel the length of West Africa and you'll quickly learn it is extremely malleable and fun to play with. For many people it's their 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th language, so they're making it up and playing with it too!

[icambron]

Oh I notice oddities all the time. Unusual word orders, preposition use, that sort of thing. As an example “I barely have experience of” is perfectly clear but not idiomatic, enough to tag you as likely non-native (compare to “I’ve barely experienced”). The thing about most native English speakers is that we don’t care; we’re just happy everyone else is speaking English. If the cost of every person in the world being able to communicate with me is hearing some very-slightly-off phrasing, that is a great bargain.

(It’s also not always true. While I’m relatively familiar with UK, Irish, Aussie, and NZ English and can often identify them in writing, Indian and Singaporean English still send me for a loop, and I likely mistag them. They have just as strong a claim to “native” as I have, of course, but they sound “foreign” to my ears.)

[RugnirViking]

yeah, like others have said, it's very easy to see a lot of non-native english comments all across the internet, tv, real world, in pretty much every space. It's something that it's fairly easy to ignore - people are usually able to get their point across, especially because native speakers have a whole lot of experience with interacting with non-native speakers, especially those from major language families, so can usually recognise patterns in broken grammar.

It's something I have experienced the other way too, living abroad as a native english speaker, I realised how much more perfect I had to get things, because there are very few foreigners learning to speak this language, so I have to be much more precise with how I phrase things, as people don't have the practise with parsing my broken language haha.

[princeb]

the dialects in australia, NZ, england, US, Canada have a handful of unique idiomatic grammatical structures. never mind the varieties in the british colonies in asia and africa where the native/imported community outnumber british descendants - and im not referring to the colloquial dialects or creoles but the formal english varieties within each country. when you are correcting someone's english, are you correcting a grammatical mistake or a grammatical variety that you're not familiar with? it's fraught with danger.