# Linguistic studies of non-native error patterns? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 17, 2013, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistic-studies-of-non-native-error-patterns/676582 "2013-12-17T18:50:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [December 17, 2013, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistic-studies-of-non-native-error-patterns/676582/1 "2013-12-17T18:50:00Z")
Do linguists ever study patterns of errors in English by non-native speakers and develop enough data to identify the native language of a speaker? I have known native speakers of many languages and have noticed that each group tends to make the same errors (Russians omit articles, Chinese make gender errors, etc.) ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2013, 2:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistic-studies-of-non-native-error-patterns/676582/2 "2013-12-18T02:18:02Z")
It’s not even necessary to study the errors in the speech of native speakers of language A who are speaking language B. Linguists can look at the various phonological, grammatical, syntactic, semantic, and vocabulary patterns in language A and in language B and predict what mistakes the native speakers of A will be likely to make when they speak language B. ---
**Author:** ![F.Pu-du-he-pa-as](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/c89c15/32.png) [@F.Pu-du-he-pa-as](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/F.Pu-du-he-pa-as)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2013, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistic-studies-of-non-native-error-patterns/676582/3 "2013-12-18T05:13:54Z")
What Wendell Wagner said. There are a few times when linguists do the sort of thing that you mention. One of them is studying ancient texts, or even not-so-ancient texts, where you suspect or know that the author was not a native speaker of the language, and looking at the errors gives you some idea about what their native language was or how it worked. Think about late antiquity or early Medieval times, for instance, where people were still writing Latin, but the spoken language had moved on. In general, there are a lot of interesting linguistic question tied into the ways that languages are produced by non-native speakers. The area that I’m particularly interested in, for instance, is what happens when you have enough non-native speakers of a language that they start to influence the original language. You can find cases in historical linguistics where a certain set of changes could only have arisen through the sorts of errors that non-native speakers would make. You can also find change in progress in the large immigrant communities of the major cities of Europe, where young children learning the language often only have access to people who are non-native speakers themselves. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2013, 7:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistic-studies-of-non-native-error-patterns/676582/4 "2013-12-18T07:33:31Z")
One of the common “errors” my kids make speaking English to me is in response to negative questions. For example, if I ask “Aren’t you hungry?” they’ll answer “Yes” to agree they’re not hungry, while English idiom would be “No.” Is there a term to distinguish how negative questions are answered in a language? (French addresses the problem elegantly via a third word: _Oui_, _Non_ and _Si!_) ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2013, 11:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistic-studies-of-non-native-error-patterns/676582/5 "2013-12-18T11:38:26Z")
septimus, read this Wikipedia entry for some information about the various sorts of yes/no patterns in languages: > **[Yes and no](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_and_no)** > > Yes and no, or word pairs with similar words, are expressions of the affirmative and the negative, respectively, in several languages, including English. Some languages make a distinction between answers to affirmative versus negative questions and may have three-form or four-form systems. English originally used a four-form system up to and including Early Middle English and Modern English has reduced to a two-form system consisting of 'yes' and 'no'. It exists in many facets of communication, ... ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2013, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistic-studies-of-non-native-error-patterns/676582/6 "2013-12-18T12:18:44Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > septimus, read this Wikipedia entry for some information about the various sorts of yes/no patterns in languages: > > [Yes and no - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_and_no) Thanks, Wendell. Fascinating! So English once had not just 2 answer words, nor 3 like French, but a full complement of four with the the equivalent of French _Si_ evolving as _yea so_ –\> _yes_ ---
**Author:** ![psychonaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/psychonaut/32/4655_2.png) [@psychonaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/psychonaut)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2013, 1:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistic-studies-of-non-native-error-patterns/676582/7 "2013-12-18T13:29:55Z")
> [@CookingWithGas](#): > > Do linguists ever study patterns of errors in English by non-native speakers and develop enough data to identify the native language of a speaker? Yes. At least, computational linguists do. The problem is called _native language identification_, or NLI for short. It’s a rather popular research problem lately, and there have been competitions at major computational linguistics conferences to see who can produce the most accurate system. See [NLI Shared Task 2013](http://www.nlisharedtask2013.org/), for example, which was held at a workshop at this year’s Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. I’ve got a basic understanding of the principles and have colleagues for whom this is a main area of study, so I can probably give further details if you’re interested. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2013, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistic-studies-of-non-native-error-patterns/676582/8 "2013-12-18T14:52:21Z")
Another thing to consider is the caliber of the teaching of English to the individuals who are making mistakes in English. Some of the mistakes they’re making may be because they were taught to make those mistakes. For an example of even native English speakers being taught incorrectly, consider the use of _him and I_ as the object of a verb or preposition. ---
**Author:** ![Isamu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/7c8e57/32.png) [@Isamu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isamu)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2013, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistic-studies-of-non-native-error-patterns/676582/9 "2013-12-18T15:07:37Z")
> [@CookingWithGas](#): > > Do linguists ever study patterns of errors in English by non-native speakers and develop enough data to identify the native language of a speaker? Yes, linguists do study patterns of errors by non-native speakers in English. I did it myself several times when I was at university. It can be a valuable real-world data source of how grammars, phonetics, etc. differ between languages. Actually the data is useful for lots of areas of linguistic study. It also happens in reverse too. Non-English speaking people studying their non-native speakers for various purposes. It’s very interesting. ---
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2013, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linguistic-studies-of-non-native-error-patterns/676582/10 "2013-12-19T03:16:22Z")
> [@psychonaut](#): > > Yes. At least, computational linguists do. The problem is called _native language identification_, or NLI for short. It’s a rather popular research problem lately, and there have been competitions at major computational linguistics conferences to see who can produce the most accurate system. See [NLI Shared Task 2013](http://www.nlisharedtask2013.org/), for example, which was held at a workshop at this year’s Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. I’ve got a basic understanding of the principles and have colleagues for whom this is a main area of study, so I can probably give further details if you’re interested. Thank you for that, more than I ever expected to discover. I am surprised that it is actually a kind of specialty. I am not a serious student of linguistics so details would probably go over my head but I’ll check this out. > [@septimus](#): > > (French addresses the problem elegantly via a third word: _Oui_, _Non_ and _Si!_) Well, whattaya know. I learned more on the SDMB than in 5 years of high school French. Another error I hear from Spanish speakers is a double negative, because that can be a word-for-word translation for a phrase that is grammatically correct in Spanish. Ex.: “I don’t have no one”. (_No tengo a nadie_ --Carlos Santana). (Plenty of English speakers make the same error.[sup]1[/sup]) * * * 1. The prescriptivist in me refers to this as an error. A descriptivist may call it a subculture dialect.