How Immigrants and Other ESL Students Make American English Their Own

I was born in the United States and therefore speak American English, because, aside from a brief few years in my childhood when my father assured me that my first language was Mandarin Chinese (my mother’s native tongue), I was raised in an English-speaking household.

Despite the fact that my sister Jenny and I heard English for most of the year, when we lived with my father, summers spent with my mother in California weren’t multilingual. My mother spoke Chinese as often as she needed to, and in the Bay Area in the mid-nineties, there were plenty of opportunities. She “charmed” the hostesses at various restaurants and used her outside voice on the phone to her family in Taipei. My two younger sisters, Tessa and Shaina (half sisters, if we’re being technical, but I am not) went to Chinese school on the weekends and, at various points in their lives, were sent to live in Taipei with my mother’s family—an ersatz language immersion program, if only because everyone around them spoke Mandarin, so they had to keep up. My sister Jenny and I don’t know enough Mandarin to do anything useful, but I like to tell myself and anyone who is listening that I can sort of understand it.

It’s not quite a surprise that ESL classes are geared toward goals and action…but it is a bit of a disappointment.

To be clear—any actual facility I have with Mandarin is due to context. I can tell when my mother is talking about her children, but usually, she’s gesticulating in our general direction. Despite my actual inability to, say, ask where the bathroom is in Mandarin, spending time around a native speaker occasionally influences the way I talk. If I’m with my mother and am not particularly annoyed at her at that moment and she’s holding something that I might want to eat, I will say, “Let me see see that scone.” This isn’t because I’m a child, but because “Ràng wǒ kàn kàn,” which is the same sentence in Mandarin, repeats the verb “kàn,” “to see,” and in my brain, that’s nice. (The reason why is simple—repeating a verb in Mandarin indicates that you want to try to do something and suggests effort.) My sisters and I will say this to one another in our group chat or in person, too. This manner of speaking is definitely English but informed by our personal context—in this case, our mother, who will also ask to see see something because, I guess, that turn of phrase is endemic to the women in my immediate family. But if I were to ask a friend to let me see see the $756 dress she doesn’t think she should buy but ultimately will, I imagine that on some level, she’d wonder if I have incurred brain damage and what, if anything, she can do to help. 

This is technically and actually a nonstandard use of English, and one that I hardly imagine will take off—but it is unique to me, my family, and my identity, just like my use of “like” and other filler words are. And if I’ve done anything close to a good job so far, it’s clear that using “like” in the way that this book covers is a uniquely American tic. “I wonder if they teach this in ESL classes,” a man I found in the dregs of a dating app once typed to me when I mentioned that I was writing a book about this very subject. (I didn’t deign to meet this person, who shared with me that he was about to watch a collection of experimental documentary shorts from the 1960s, mostly because there’s nothing I’d rather do less than that. However, I thank him for bringing up this pertinent point, which is worthy of attention, and hope that he’s found whatever he was looking for. It certainly wasn’t me.)

Consulting a few resources aimed at teaching non-native speakers how to speak English proves that the experimental film aficionado had a point—ESL classes are geared toward teaching people how to speak English in a professional capacity and not like a native speaker who knows the secret language of filler words and interjections and how to use them properly. Thankfully, I have two primary sources in my own life who were able to provide a little more context.

My mother moved to the United States in 1981 and has lived here ever since, bouncing around from the Bay Area to the Pacific Northwest, stopping briefly in Albuquerque and then, for reasons my sisters and I will never quite understand, leaving the desert behind for the rolling countryside of North Carolina, some forty minutes outside of Raleigh. Even though she’s lived in this country for over forty years, she hasn’t lost her accent, and she speaks English not quite like a native speaker but well enough to my ear that I hardly register her accent or syntax as foreign.

She learned English the way many immigrants do—first, formally, in school, and then practically, by surrounding herself with native speakers. Some of the aforementioned native speakers included the casts of both Happy Days and Leave It to Beaver, two shows that she watched growing up in Taipei. “TV is more entertaining,” she said. “What we learned at school could be dead boring.” That foundation, combined with time spent in various pockets of this country, means that she still speaks with the formality that so many ESL speakers do—not because she’s a particularly formal person (not by a long shot), but because this is how she learned and, as my sisters and I figured out a while ago, you really can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

My cousin Winnie, born and raised between Taipei and Canada, is a different story. When my family and I went to Taiwan in 2019 for the first time in almost twenty years, Winnie dutifully led her big American cousins around, switching seamlessly from Mandarin to American-accented English that is probably better than mine. “I learned English naturally by being immersed in an English-speaking environment,” she says. “It started with my mom playing Disney English every day for me starting at three, and growing up watching Disney Channel shows in English. Then at seven, moving to Canada and attending school in an all-Canadian environment. The biggest help with being able to speak English fluently is consistent usage, whether being in Taiwan or abroad.” 

Assimilation isn’t the desired outcome—but people are watching Friends around the world…and are therefore absorbing American mannerisms, idioms, and expressions.

Winnie also picked up English by watching a lot of YouTube—vlogs, mostly—as a natural complement to the English she was learning in school. “That experience is way different than learning English in school, because I watched a lot of vlogs,” she says. “Hosts speak naturally, and there’s a lot of improv. In school, it’s goal-oriented: getting directions, for business, and for formal usage. Even in conversation classes, foreign teachers are not encouraged to focus on filler words or slang.”

It’s not quite a surprise that ESL classes are geared toward goals and action—English is the language of international commerce, after all—but it is a bit of a disappointment. And a lot of the world tries to mimic American speech, thanks to the proliferation of our media; if my mother and my cousin were both watching American sitcoms and the like during their respective childhoods, then I’d bet a dollar and a doughnut that they are not alone. And, happily, my hunch is correct. According to a 2021 article in The New York Times, the pals who hung out at Central Perk for ten seasons of television have served as de facto English tutors to people around the world. Friends, that innocuous, imminently watchable cultural touchstone is “a near perfect-amalgam of easy-to-understand English and real-life scenarios that feel familiar even to people who live worlds away from Manhattan’s West Village,” Mike Ives writes. Assimilation isn’t the desired outcome—but people are watching Friends around the world, as the show is and will be in syndication until the end of the world, and are therefore absorbing American mannerisms, idioms, and expressions.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Like: A History of the World’s Most Hated (and Misunderstood) Word by Megan C. Reynolds. Copyright © 2025 by Megan C. Reynolds. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.