To the Editor, 

To the ears of Mr. Agudo, I speak perfect English; I have a varied vocabulary, can participate in daily interactions, can provide an exorbitant amount of detail in a retelling and can certainly hold my own in an argument. This shouldn’t be a surprise; I’ve been speaking the language since I was four. 

But in the eyes of a Jane Smith, a Karen from accounting or a Betsy in HR, I don’t. Looks of confusion and an “umm…what?” are a common response to non-Americans in America like me.  However, I am just as confused when I face the variations of words that sound nothing like I’d expect from their spelling; like hearing New Yorkers say “kuhohfee”. But the problem isn’t the confusion or the miscommunication. It’s the embarrassment, shame and discrimination that come with them, almost always placed on the non-American speaker.  

In England, anything that sounded remotely like Oprah was American; British English and American English are two quite different tongues. As I was checking into my hotel, the receptionist asked “Visiting from America aren’t you?” I wrote this one off as a fluke, thinking she knew I went to college in the U.S. That was, after all, the first time my accent was characterized as American and I was floored. But as the days went by, more and more non-Americans put a label on my forehead and threw me in the bag of “Americans.” 

I was embarrassed by the fact that I had an accent for a while. It was not American, so it wasn’t perfect, so what I said wasn’t worth hearing. I came to realize quite late in the game that outside the U.S. and Karen’s mind, it’s not just Jimmy Fallon that passes as American,  but also me.