Reconstructing an Indo-European Family Tree from Non-native English Texts

Mother tongue interference is the phenomenon where linguistic systems of a mother tongue are transferred to another language. Although there has been plenty of work on mother tongue interference, very little is known about how strongly it is transferred to another language and about what relation there is across mother tongues. To address these questions, this paper explores and visualizes mother tongue interference preserved in English texts written by Indo-European language speakers. This paper further explores linguistic features that explain why certain relations are preserved in English writing, and which contribute to related tasks such as native language identification.