This contrastive interlanguage analysis explores the use of learner English 'well' as a pragmatic marker in the Dutch, French, German, Spanish and Chinese units of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) and compares the findings with those of Aijmer (2011) for the Swedish LINDSEI unit and an akin native speaker corpus. Well prevails in each of the learner corpora (save for the Chinese), as to its speech management functions. These differences are acribed to an intricate interplay of factors, covering, inter alia, the speech context, learners' restricted pragmatic marker inventory, their ample exposure to well, and L1 interference .