The mysteries of being perceived as a native speaker

I was working with the Airport police yesterday with an asylum seeker from Afghanistan. I spoke Farsi, she spoke Dari. I had heard Dari before and knew this sort of Farsi-Dari communication was possible and as no Dari interpreter was available, I was called in. I knew it would be hard but I have to admit, I did't expect I'd have so much trouble understanding her. 

After about 20 minutes the lady said in Dari, "let me try to speak in English, because Dari seems to be hard for you to understand". I automatically thought, well.. my Farsi is poorer than I thought. 

The thing is, if you speak Farsi really well, in theory you should be able to understand Dari pretty well too, so I thought it was clear the problem was my Farsi and not the fact that I didn't understand Dari too well. 

I continued speaking in Farsi and she spoke in English. After about an hour she asked: Where are you from? I said "Here." and pointed to the ground. To my surprise, she asked: "You are not from Iran?" 

Strangely to me, for some reason, it started to seem like the Afghan asylum seeker thought I was Iranian. I was surprised and thought she was just being polite, especially after her having to switch to English earlier, but about 10 minutes later she asked again: "You're really from Slovakia? I really thought you were Iranian.".

This left me with a few things to think about:

1) Somehow, what really seemed to've  happened was, an educated speaker of Dari had mistaken me for a native speaker of Farsi from Iran after an hour long face-to-face conversation. The fact that I do not look Iranian is even more puzzling.

2) In a biased self-assessment, I would say I speak Farsi at a level of about 90% of my native Slovak. It is objectively ok and good enough for Farsi/Farsi police work, but not enough for Farsi/Dari and I think not enough to sound native in longer discussions. I think after a longer discussion it is clear that I make too many strange mistakes here and there which should alert the person I'm talking to that I am not a native speaker. I also don't look Iranian.

3) The asylum seeker was educated, had a university degree, has been in Iran many times, she was familiar with Iranian Farsi and, still somehow, I managed to appear Iranian to her. 

4) It seems the range of language competence where someone can appear to be a native speaker to other natives or near-natives is really very wide (my guess would be 85-99% level of your native language) depending on how long the discussion is, surrounding noise, how familiar the native speaker you are talking to is with foreign accents in their native language, how many regional accents there are in their language (the more there are, the more likely the native speaker, even though they can hear your foreign accent and weird structures, they will just assume you are a native speaker speaking with a native accent they are not familiar with), whether the native speaker is aware the person they are talking to is a foreigner or not (this point reminds me of magic tricks, where if you know what to look for, you will see how it's done, iff not, you will think it's magic) and just general circumstances (stress level, attention level etc.).

5) It has happened to me before several times that people mistook me for a native speaker (including many times in Mandarin over the phone and now Farsi after an hour long face-to-face conversation). It has also happened to me that Slovak people thought I was a foreigner and not Slovak after we spoke Slovak for 20 minutes (I am Slovak 🤷‍♂️). It has also happened to me several times that some of my acquaintances from the US thought I was American even though they had known me for years, and it has also happened to me, that people from the US, especially people from the language community, seemed to've heard that I was a foreigner after we had exchanged only a couple of sentences.

I would lie if I said that I didn't think being mistaken for an Iranian native speaker in a situation like this wasn't one of the greatest compliments I had ever received when it comes to language learning and am very grateful for it. It is a moment of encouragement for all the work I did with the language. At the same time, realizing how wide that range in language competence in order to appear native is, realistically, that language competence range seems to be really too wide, so I just...stay grounded and enjoy the work looking forward. 

There is no good, only better.