At the Democratic national convention, Kamala Harris’s nieces explained how to pronounce Harris’s name. Chappell Roan gave fans a friendly “final warning” about the pronunciation of hers. And Zendaya settled the matter on video.
All three helped to define 2024 – and spent the year hearing people get their names wrong: each appears on lists of the year’s most mispronounced words in the US and UK, produced by the language-learning website Babbel, which reminds us that they’re pronounced COM-a-la HAR-iss, CHAP-uhl ROHN and Zen-DAY-a.
The lists, created with the closed-captioning and subtitling companies the Captioning Group and the British Institute of Verbatim Reporters, show the stars in good company: among the other mispronounced names and words are Barry Keoghan (BARR-ee key-OH-gin, with a hard g), the Irish actor and star of Saltburn, and Pete Buttigieg (Boot-Edge-Edge), the US transportation secretary.
But it wasn’t just humans whose names were mispronounced. Among this year’s other list-makers:
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The Dutch Kooikerhondje (COY-ker-HUND-che), a breed of dog owned by the world’s best baseball player, Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Ohtani’s dog won fans after “throwing” the first pitch at a game (he carried the ball from the pitcher’s mound to his crouching owner at home plate).
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Shein, the fast-fashion site – it’s SHE-in, not SHEEN or SHINE.
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The drug in the weight-loss medications Ozempic and Wegovy is semaglutide (sem-ah-GLOO-tide).
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Phryge, the mascot of the Paris Olympics and summer Paralympics, is pronounced FREE-je. It was a nod to the Phrygian cap, an emblematic accessory of the French revolutionaries.
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The flygskam (FLEEG-skam) – or flight-shame – movement is pushing people to cut down on flying to help the planet.
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Also in the word of professional sports: Joško Gvardiol (YOSH-ko GVAR-dee-ol) plays soccer (FOOT-ball) for Manchester City and Croatia.
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And the mispronunciation of the word espresso (es-PRESS-oh) as ex-PRESS-oh sparked outrage among some coffee fans. The word has been in the news thanks to the song by Sabrina Carpenter, who also made headlines for her relationship with Keoghan.
Why all the mispronunciation? Blame it, in part, on the Norman invasion of 1066. 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’s 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. That’s probably not so new. “I imagine before TV news, there were people saying politicians’ names all kinds of wild ways,” having only read them in the newspaper, Holliday says.
Finally, there’s the phenomenon of words becoming what Holliday describes as “shibboleths” – in this case, words that can distinguish an in-group from an out-group. That certainly seems to be the case for Harris, whose name was mispronounced by almost half the speakers at the Republican national convention this summer – getting it wrong showed you were aligned with Donald Trump, who said he “couldn’t care less” about getting it right. But shibboleths can extend beyond politics: pronouncing your favorite celebrity’s name in a certain way, for instance, might indicate that you’re a real fan.
Meanwhile, as with any list of words of the year, the document offers a look back, Esteban Touma, of Babbel, told the Associated Press. As Roan’s music gained popularity over the year, it was an interesting cultural moment to watch as people learned to pronounce her name, he said.
“The way we create understanding with each other is just trying to do these things,” Touma said.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
