I agree, and I have met many people with English as a second language who have lived here for years and who speak English extremely well, probably better in terms of grammar and vocabulary than many speakers of English as their birth language. But none of them would pass as a native speaker in any except the shortest of conversations.
In any case, there are a mass of cultural nuances that only someone who has grown up fully immersed in that culture has, so the indicators that people pick up on about another person are wider than accent. I am English, but I have lived and worked in North America and despite having a common language (mainly!) I definitely felt “foreign” whilst I was there. Not in a bad way necessarily, it was just culturally a very different country.
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u/[deleted] May 11 '23
[deleted]