When people hear a speaker with a “foreign accent,” they often try to guess the speaker's background. Sometimes racial features and sometimes a style of clothing will help listeners guess correctly, but often the only reliable clue seems to be how the individual talks. In such cases, questions put to the speaker such as “Are you German?” or “Are you Spanish?” suggest an intuition about the nature of language, an awareness, however unconscious, that the native language of a speaker can somehow cause the individual to sound “foreign” in speaking another language.

The detection of foreign accents is just one example of the awareness that people may often have of cross-linguistic influence, which is also known as language transfer. That awareness is also evident from time to time in opinions that people have about foreign language study. Many believe that the study of one language (e.g., Latin) will make easier the study of a closely related language (e.g., French). Similarly, people often believe that some languages are “easy” in comparison with others. For example, many English-speaking university students see European languages such as French as less difficult than Oriental languages such as Chinese. Since the similarities between English and French seem to be relatively great, French is often considered “easy.”

An awareness of language transfer is also evident in the mimicking of foreigners. While the representation of foreigners in ethnic jokes is often crude in more ways than one, stereotypes of the way foreigners talk are sometimes highly developed among actors.