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linguistics - What makes a non-native English speaker sound foreign?



I'm not a native speaker. However, I have tried a lot during last 10 years to learn English at a high level of proficiency and to become fluent in conversation.


However, when I talk to some of my friends in US over Skype (found via my profession), they tell me that I talk like a foreigner. But they don't know why is that.


What is/are the reasons that can make a not-native English speaker sound like a foreigner? Is it about pronunciation, or about syntax, or is it maybe just a false assumption coming from a psychological background due to the fact that the other party knows that you are not an English man/woman.


Update: I asked this question specifically about English, since English is the most widespread language on the earth and tens of different dialects and millions of different idiolects seem to alleviate the problem of "sounding-foreign".



Answer



Obviously without hearing an example, it's only possible to talk in generalities. In terms of syntax and vocabulary, even if you don't produce any utterances that are ungrammatical per se, you might give yourself away by not using features (e.g. filler words/pharses like "you know", "though", "actually") that are common in native speech, or by using features not common to the spoken register (e.g. overuse of non-contracted forms).


In terms of pronunciation, native speakers are tuned to all sorts of fine phonetic detail. So even if, say, the quality of your vowels is very close to that of a native speaker, you could give yourself away by other subtle clues: e.g. subtle differences in the duration of sounds, having different patters of Voice Onset Time to native speakers, not glottalising vowels before a syllable-final voiceless consonant, not overlapping segments of consonant clusters such as [kt] in the same way as native speakers of English, to mention some common phenomena that tend to differ between English and other languages but not so much within accents of English and which can give an accent away as "foreign". But really there are virtually too many possible subtle differences to mention, and surely some that haven't been systematically studied.


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