At the Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris’ nephews explained How to pronounce the name Harris. Chappell Roan gave fans a friendly “final warning” about her pronunciation. And Zendaya settled the matter on video.
All three helped define 2024. – and spent the year listening to people get their names wrong: each appearing on lists of the year’s most mispronounced words in the US and UK by language-learning website Babbel, which reminds us that they’re pronounced COM -a-la HAR-iss, CHAP-uhl ROHN and Zen-DAY-a.
Lists created with captioning and subtitling companies Captioning Group and the British Institute of Verbatim Reporters show the stars in good company: among other mispronounced names and words are Barry Keoghan (BARR-ee key-OH-gin, with a hard g), Irish actor and star from Saltburn, and Pete Buttigieg (Boot-Edge-Edge), US Secretary of Transportation.
But not just the people whose names were mispronounced. Among this year’s other lists:
-
The Dutch Kooikerhondje (COY-ker-HUND-che), a dog breed owned by the best baseball player in the world, Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Ohtani’s dog won fans after he “threw” the first pitch in a game (he carried the ball from the pitcher’s mound to his crouching owner at home plate).
-
Shein, the fast fashion site – that’s TЯ-in, not SHEEN or SHINE.
-
The drug in the weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy is semaglutide (sem-ah-GLOO-tide).
-
Phryge, the mascot of the Paris Olympics and Summer Paralympics, is pronounced FREE-je. It was a nod to the Phrygian hat, an iconic accessory of French revolutionaries.
-
The flygskam (FLEEG-skam) movement – or the shame-of-flying movement – is getting people to cut back on flying to help the planet.
-
More in professional sports: Yoshko Guardiol (YOSH-ko GVAR-dee-ol) plays soccer (FOOT-ball) for Manchester City and Croatia.
-
And the mispronunciation of the word espresso (es-PRESS-oh) as ex-PRESS-oh has caused outrage among some coffee fans. The word was in the news thanks to the song of Sabrina Carpenterwho also made headlines for her relationship with Keoghan.
Why all the mispronunciation? The Norman invasion of 1066 is partly to blame for this. English spelling is incredibly confusing thanks to the ways it has combined other languages, says Nicole Holliday, acting associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
On top of that, there is the linguistic “instability” that comes from the democratization of news. If one person mispronounces a name in a video for their thousands of TikTok followers, it can have a knock-on effect. This is probably not that new. “I imagine before TV news, there were people saying politicians’ names in all kinds of wild ways” after only reading them in the paper, Holliday says.
Finally, there is the phenomenon of words becoming what Holliday describes as “shibboleths”—in this case, words that can distinguish the in-group from the out-group. That certainly seems the case for Harris, whose name was mispronounced by almost half the speakers at the Republican National Convention this summer — the misunderstanding showed you agree with Donald Trump, who said he “couldn’t care less” to get it right. But shibboleths can extend beyond politics: pronouncing your favorite celebrity’s name a certain way, for example, can mean you’re real ventilator.
Meanwhile, as with any word of the year list, the document offers a look back, Babbel’s Esteban Tuma told The Associated Press. As Roan’s music grew in popularity over the year, it was an interesting cultural moment to watch people learn to pronounce her name, he said.
“The way we build rapport with each other is just by trying to do these things,” Tuma said.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
