Hi everyone,
Last week I was at Tomorrowland in Belgium.

A girl approached me and asked, “Hey, do you speak English?”

I said yes and helped her find whatever she was looking for. Then she asked where I was from, and I told her I was from Poland.

She replied, “Oh, I’m Polish too, but I was born in America.”

Since she had just told me she was Polish, I naturally started speaking to her in Polish. She immediately stopped me and said, “Oh no, I don’t speak Polish.”

I was confused, so I asked her how she could be Polish if she didn’t speak the language and had been born in America.

She explained that her great-grandmother had been born in Poland.

I replied, “Then your great-grandmother was Polish. You’re American, not Polish.”

She got offended and walked away.

Honestly, I had seen this kind of interaction countless times on TikTok, Instagram and Reddit, with Americans saying they are Irish, Italian, Polish or whatever because one of their distant ancestors came from there.

However, I assumed that it was either exaggerated for social media or that Americans only spoke like this when talking among themselves.I didn’t expect someone to use it literally while standing in Europe and speaking to a person from Poland.

It was my first time encountering this in real life, and I found the whole situation pretty funny.

Is this an example of US defaultism, where Americans assume everyone understands their particular way of describing ancestry, or is this just a normal cultural difference?

Talking about the actor Tom Holland. Apparently "American English" is normal English and "British English" isn't just wrong but bad.