[mock-possum]

I feel like ‘actual English’ comes off as unnecessarily mean here. There is no ‘actual English’ there are just different regional and cultural variations.

You may personally like one or another better, you may find some particular varieties easier or harder to understand, but that doesn’t make those people any more or less ‘actual’ English speakers than you are. They are ‘actually’ speaking English, just like you.

If you wanted to phrase this in a less fraught way, you might say “Yea but you can almost always tell it’s an Indian because they tend to write characteristically distinct from <your nationality> English speakers” -

and I would agree with you, sentence structure and idioms do usually make it pretty easy to recognize.

[deadbabe]

Actual English is when you speak in the spirit of the language, not just the grammatical and syntactical structures. It should be free of speech patterns from other languages and more assimilated.

[kranner]

"The spirit of the language" is just a restatement of your original assertion about "actual English", based on what seems an assumed authority to make such a claim.

[Suppafly]

I think people are downing this because it comes off as if don't have an appreciation for different dialects, but you're making a key point. There are a lot of people that 'speak english' by using english vocab with their native tongue's grammar and that is different (and less intelligible) than speaking a recognized dialect.