Overheard in London

[baratron]

I overheard the most thought-provoking conversation today. This woman went up to a man who was working behind one of the market stalls in Camden Market and asked him if he was from some specific part of Nigeria

Comments

[the_siobhan]

Through circumstance of timing my sister ended up going to public school with a high concentration of East Asians in the early years. She could identify immediately if somebody's background was Korean, Chinese, Thai or Vietnamese. I always found that fascinating.

[polyfrog]

I grew up around East Asians and Native Americans.
I can tell broadly where an East Asian person is from geographically, but not as accurately geopolitically, because the national borders don't always line up with the ethnic ones.

Native Americans I'm not as good at. But I can still tell roughly that this person is probably from a different nation than that one, even if I don't know which nation either is from, if you see what I mean.

White folks, I'm usually lost.

[barakta]

When I lived and taught English to students in Romania I was staying mostly in a city 20km from the Hungarian border which was Hungarian territory until recentlyish. There are mini towns which still transact almost entirely in Hungarian. All the families I stayed with her Hungarian-Romanians speaking Hungarian at home and Romanian outside the home

[artremis]

I think you (one) learns this kind of stuff from habitation even as an adult - I can now identify people as "looking Estonian" when before I would have thought just some flavour of Eastern or Northen European - or guessed Slavic which would be Wrong

[artremis]

There are prolly linguistic clues too - I know you've said "broad London accents" just to mean not Nigerian-sounding but obviously there's no one "London" accent. So there are prolly subtle differences in a Nigeria-influnced Camden (or whereever in London those people actually lived) accent and say a Ghanian-influenced Streatham one.
And word use will show patterns too (as a Small in Streatham I apparently picked up a few Ghanian turns-of-phrase along with the fun mixture of accents and dialects I actually got from my family - though they mostly faded when we moved to the very much more homogenous Sussex)

[thekumquat]

I think everyone learns to associate groups of people when there is a correlation with place - if there wasn't that correlation, we wouldn't learn the patterns. I don't think it's a problem if you manage to think of potential origins (or any other trait) of someone as a possibility, rather than a likelihood. For example I recently met someone I've been working with for a year. He has a fairly generic British Isles accent, and sounds quite rural - he mostly talks to farmers. He turns out to look like Ciphergoth with short hair and somewhat older. Combined with his surname and shape of his eyes, I wondered if he was originally Irish. Eventually we got on to talking about his family and turns out he was indeed born in Ireland, but lived in Sussex from a young age

[_nicolai_]

She may have been also basing this on their speech. Some accents and speech mannerisms can be very local. If you are from the southern Netherlands you can often, I have been told, tell to within a few miles which village someone comes from.