What subtle pronunciation cues would a trained linguistic hear that might reveal someone's country of origin?

Question

For instance, that a fluent native-sounding English speaker, posing as an American, actually grew up in Eastern Europe.  I'm looking for the descriptive terms that a linguist would use to explain how she figured out where this person was from -- i.e. their pronunciation of voiceless fricatives.  

I know this is very technical.  Appreciate any help.

Laurence · Accepted Answer

So called dental consonants in English are not made with the teeth (as in most languages) but by the tongue touching the gum ridge. The dental fricative, TH, is only found around the perifery of Europe (in Icelandic, Gaelic, Welsh, English, Castillian, Greek) and native speakers of other languages tend to substitute a T, or an S, while many native Anglophones from S.E. England substitute an F.

Inselstricken · Answer

Laurence seems to be confusing plosives and fricatives. English has alveolar plosives [t, d] where Gaelic  has dental plosives.

To find country of origin - very obvious things sometimes,  the dark / l/ you hear from Russian speakers, the fact that French does not have voiced or voiceless dental fricatives - with the result that English speakers parody French-speakers as saying /ze/ for /the/.  Gaelic, Arabic, other languages have a voiced velar fricative, which English does not - really, you just listen for the sounds, and if you know their distribution in certain languages, you can make an educated guess. You also listen to the intonation - Swedish v different from English for example.
The technical term is using your ears....

What subtle pronunciation cues would a trained linguistic hear that might reveal someone's country of origin?

2 Answers