In this paper, we examine whether a student's language background and other demographic factors have any relationship to their performance on prose questions in math, which we define as questions with open-ended answers containing one or more complete sentences of English. Prose questions stand in contrast to non-prose questions, which are more traditional questions in math courses, requiring an objective answer, such as a number, an equation, a diagram, etc. Performing an exploratory analysis on exam scores for 463 students in a first-year linear algebra course, we use stepdown regression to identify significant factors contributing to a student's non-prose tilt: how much better a student performs on non-prose versus prose questions. We find that gender is the only significant factor contributing to a student's non-prose tilt. In particular, no linguistic factors we considered, including whether or not a student was a native English speaker, emerged as significant.