Shibboleths

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A shibboleth is any use of a person's language use that signals someone's origin, intentional or not.

It refers to the practice of picking out people this way, and to phrases commonly used for this.

Pronunciation

Shibboleths usually focus on pronunciation, and can be used to fish out speakers of languages that do not have certain sounds in them, since people will usually automatically pronounce the closest sound they are used to pronouncing.

Grammar

Some shibboleths are grammatical.

For example, when you hear "I have a doubt" you can guess the speaker's native language is Spanish (or apparently Indian(verify)).

There are also quite a few shibboleths that are used primarily to distinguish oneself, e.g. as having had high education, and therefore are regularly regarded as prescriptive snobbery.

For example, "don't split your infinitives" originated in the Victorian higher classes wishing to distinguish themselves. This was based on observing that Latin (then widely used by scholars) does not -- but not because it's proper style, but because its morphology doesn't let you do it at all. But English's grammar works differently, and in practice sometimes it's a good idea, sometimes it's a bad idea.

There are other sorts of intentional distinctions you could call shibboleths, such as things that identify one as being an English major, or as working in academia.

Academic writing has some very typical sentences that you don't really see anywhere else, some formal, some semi-archaic.

You could even argue that the widespread apostrophe misuse is one of the shibboleths of our time (though you'ld have a hard time arguing that very strongly).

See also:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
• http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words/shibboleth.html