This article investigates the construction and maintenance of ideologies regarding the legitimacy of English as the dominant language in the United States in interactions involving adult immigrant learners of English. As both the researcher and these students' English as second language (ESL) instructor, I am a participant in the ESL classroom and interview conversations that are analyzed in this study. In my analysis, I consider how these adult ESL students and I take up positions and are positioned in ways that affiliate us with particular language identities, such as "Chinese speaker," "non-native speaker of English," or "English speaker," among others. I argue that our subject positioning according to language affiliation provides one of the means by which normative beliefs about English in the United States are reconstituted. (Contains 6 footnotes.)