>I know exactly what you mean. A few years ago I was in Quebec City and we went to a chinese restaurant. Our waiter was, of course, Chinese, but when he came over to our table and spoke, he spoke French. Clearly that shouldn't have surprised me, being in Quebec City and all, but it did. Context is everything, and I guess there were competing contexts in that instance. To this day, I wonder if he spoke French with a Chinese accent.

At the college, the lecturer in pedagogy spoke with a heavy Hungarian accent (which isn't a rarity... if you haven't quite graduated high school and learned Serbian from other Hungarians; many of my friends from the neighboring Hungarian class spoke so well you couldn't tell it was their second language). Not only that, he would occasionally invent a word, or a word form - creating, for instance, something like privilegarized instead of privileged, or would compose a sentence in a very confusing way.

Then I complained to a colleague who was attending the same course in Hungarian, and she said this guy spoke Hungarian equally bad. And he was a PhD...