I've been noticing a very specific new pattern on YouTube lately: commenters under urban planning videos that talk about the Netherlands, saying that such-and-such is actually hated by Dutch people, or considered a mistake, or a waste of tax money, or whatever... only to be immediately contradicted by a bunch of other Dutch folks and then the original commenter either starts arguing some fallacious bullshit or just disappears.
Now it's not like Dutch people can't be making bullshit claims, but I find it suspicious how this is suddenly starting to happen across *multiple* urban planning channels, and none of the suspicious commenters seem to have any of the linguistic tells of a natively-Dutch English speaker.
@joepie91 only tangentially related, but every Dutch person I've heard speaking English either had a very strong accent or sounded like a native English speaker with either a perfect American or RP accent lmao
@hazelnot There's a subset of Dutch people who speak very good English, pretty much indistinguishable from native speakers, yeah - but they're not really the majority. The majority have the typical "stone coal English" accent and weird sentence constructions.
Given the demographic of Dutch people who use YouTube, it's therefore very suspicious when *none* of the commenters have those linguistic tells. There should be at least *some* who speak imperfect English...
@joepie91 Interesting. Yeah I thought the perfect English ones were the *only* kinda cause I was like "oh well Dutch and English are pretty close so maybe that's just what it sounds like"
To be fair my sample consisted entirely of YouTubers like PJiggles and... probably more but I forgot their names, first time I realized there is actually a Dutch accent was when I came across Marcel Vos' channel and thought he was French or something at first lol
@joepie91 Oh also Decino but at first I thought he was Polish lmao