WARNING! THIS IS MOST LIKELY MY MOST BORING POST SO FAR!
The highest point of mastering a language is when you pass as a native speaker. This involves assimilating the extreme subtleties of the new language's phonology―in English, for instance, palatalising and unpalatalising the [n] phoneme is the difference between passing as a native and bearing a peculiarly grating pronunciation (take notes, Marina Maximilian Blumin); in Hebrew there are many allophones native speakers switch between without even being aware of them (e.g., take the Hebrew word נַגָּר nagar, carpenter: it's supposed to be pronounced [nɐ'gar], but the common Israeli speaker wouldn't notice the difference between the [ɐ] and the [a]). This also includes subtleties of things like colloquial grammar, registers, and use of slang (this is especially important in Japanese, in which subtleties of respectfullness are a very, very dire issue), as well as personal choice of synonyms.
However, one must be aware of the fact that different individuals vary in their personal use of allophones, grammar, &c. I've noticed that I tend not to assimilate unvoiced consonants followed by voiced ones, or vise-versa, in Hebrew, unlike many Hebrew speakers (example: pronouncing סָבְתָא savta, nanna, as ['safta] instead of ['savta], or חֶשְׁבּוֹן kheshbon, arithmetics, as [χεʒ'bon] instead of [χεʃ'bon]). Also, I noticed that I tend to avoid Hebrew phrasal verbs using the pronoun לִי li (dative of the first person singular pronoun), such as עצוב לי 'atsuv li ('I'm sad' or 'I find it saddening'), instead omitting it and replacing it with expressions of similar meaning, such as זה עצוב ze 'atsuv ('It's sad'). Perhaps this is one of the reasons I prefer English over Hebrew: it has very little phrasal verbs which make the speaker the indirect subject of his/her own sentiments (such as the Shakespearian 'methinks'). Icelandic, though, has plenty of them, such as mér líka ('I like', lit. 'It's favourable to me'). Also, in all languages I speak, I tend to observe grammar very strictly, including more archaic grammar, such as occasionally using 'I shall' or the subjunctive in English or using the bumaf letters (the letters ב, ו, מ, פ in Hebrew, before which the clitic וְ ve 'and' changes its pronunciation to [u] or [wu], written as וּ) in Hebrew, but mixing slang words and much profanity, and tending to use informal speech (fortunately for me, I'm not Japanese, so not speaking formally can pass off as a foreign trait).
Furthermore, you can note that stereotypical Israeli teachers almost always (if not always) use the allophone [ʀ] over [ʁ] of the consonant ר r, which Israelis mix freely, depending how dry their throat/mouth is at the moment. The Israeli singer Rita Yahan-Farouz has a peculiar tendency to use the same allophones for the same vowels―[a], never [ɐ], for a; [o] for o, &c. The Japanese started eliminating the allophone [g] of the consonant g, replacing it with [ŋ], even older people. And what I've mentioned so far is only what I noticed on my own.
So, this raises two questions:
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Where is the line separating between sounding native and using a personal speech patterns and non-native corruptions drawn? My friend Alex B., for instance, speaks Hebrew on a native speaker's level, and has a tendency to use high registers in a comical fashion (using אֵינִי éni, something like the Hebrew equivalent of 'I be not'), but it doesn't seem at all unnatural. Besides, even native speakers sometimes make embarrassing grammatical or even phonetical mistakes, how can one tell?
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What do these speech patterns say about the individuals, or even whole sections of society or an entire society, say about the speakers?
I (alone) wonder...
Unum diem...
(P.S.: After having written my last post, I remembered there was an Icelandic rock band I am very, very fond of and I've even mentioned them here once: Þeyr. However, they're not very well-known. Compare the history of rock in Iceland to that in, say, the UK.)
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