You encounter this a lot when the person is a non-native English speaker or has grown up in an ESL house where the dominant language is not English. Particularly when they've had to pick it up from someone who's pronunciation is ALSO influenced by the linguistic rules of their mother tongue.Maybe my vocabulary is limited to what I use and I need you to expand my knowledge. In some areas the vocabulary is pretty well limited to whomever they are allowed to spend time with, or, the school teacher doesn't know proper english any better than all the rest. It might be the only thing they know.![]()
I work closely with a lot of Maltese and Serbian folks every day. English is one of Malta's officially spoken languages, but Maltese is still the native dialect (and evolved from Medieval Sicilian). You can get some funky pronunciations of words based on vowel emphasis in romance languages vs the mutations that made it into English, or just totally different names (Pineapple is one of the great examples of a whack-a-doodle English name change). Serbia is more amusing, because they do the V/W swap common in germanic and slavic language families, so words like "working" and "marvelous" are totally different beasts. We hire folks over there who have excellent comprehension of english and can communicate effectively written and spoken, but sometimes it's still a struggle to talk to one another.

And of course, there are our friends in England, who yell at US to speak proper English, as well...
