Comment by giraffe_lady
4 hours ago
> "Can you kindly consider the following problem" not how anyone would actually speak to a valued collegue one considers smart.
Man idk, it's not how I talk but there's like 100 million nigerian english speakers, twice that indian, and they have some speech mannerisms that surprise me the first few times. I'm pretty sure I've heard exactly this from a colleague before.
Intuition about what a native speaker would do with english are scrambled right now. I'm not even sure most english is spoken by native speakers anymore, and the boundary between a native speaker and someone who has "merely" been using it as their educational and professional language for their entire life is disorienting.
Note that there are a fair number of native speakers of English in Nigeria - more than in all but 3 or 4 US states.
In addition, "non-native" English speakers in India (and Nigeria?) typically study English from the first grade, and in many cases attended elementary schools where English was the language of instruction.
I think the differences between US English and both Indian and Nigerian English have more to do with divergent evolution of the educational systems. British English has a lot of differences, too, but we don't notice it as much unless we run across things like "whilst", probably because there's more media crossover. (if you find yourself reading Thomas the Tank Engine to kids it jumps out at you, though - the entire vocabulary for railroads evolved during a period when US and British English were diverging)
>I'm not even sure most english is spoken by native speakers anymore
Per Wikipedia, only about a quarter of English speakers have it as their first language.