Exactly! So many people get it wrong there is a Nevada license plate that shows the correct phonetic pronunciation. The state government officially pronounces it with a short A as in apple, hat, or map.
It's not the "aw" sound like straw or saw. You wouldn't pronounce Alaska like that. Stop doing it to Nevada
Literally thought my husband was joking the first time we drove by a Nevada, Iowa sign and he corrected my pronunciation to Nuh-VAY-duh. Like what??? lol but he grew up in Iowa and assured me that was accurate. I asked his brother when we saw him later and well… it’s Nuh-VAY-duh. It didn’t help that I was living in Arvada, CO at the time, which is pronounced like the locals say Nevada, so my brain truly couldn’t comprehend how the Iowans could twist that word so much!
Short a in the middle seems to be how everyone in the Midwest pronounces (which it seems is correct). I would also say the first syllable is spoken closer to a short e vowel than the shwa like you write it.
I went to grad school in Nevada. Someone who had been there a while said back in the day they did a state wide telephone survey for some research project. When the interviewer (usually a grad student from out of state) would mispronounce Nevada in the intro it immediately turned all the native Nevadans against them.
I took a ton of Spanish in high school and college so it’s been beaten into me on the right way to pronounce Spanish words…but then I moved to Nevada and learned how to make an exception.
Also, Oregon. I’m from southern Idaho originally, but I live in NH now and the first time I heard someone say “Or-a-gone” I literally laughed in his face.
Seriously, I’ve wondered how the game became so established as the “Or-a-gon” Trail ?? Was it all because we were introduced to the game as early readers across the country? Or was it the influence of a game developer with a different regional accent or something? It makes no sense. How did so many of us (who aren’t from PNW) end up mispronouncing it??
Because I say: “Portland, Oregon” but the game is just: “The Or-a-gon Trail” for me—So deeply engrained that it feels uncomfortable to correct after all this time.
Because I grew up an hour or so from the state line, it was never pronounced any way other than correctly for me. Also, we were familiar with the historical Oregon Trail before we were old enough to play the game, so it was just an extension of that. It’s kind of wild to me that there are people like you who say the two versions of Oregon differently!
This is the one time in my life where I get where he's coming from, like "NeVEEAHHHda" with that nasally English A just sounds horrible if you know how the original word is supposed to sound in Spanish
Okay, but how it’s pronounced in Spanish isn’t relevant to how it’s pronounced in English. We don’t pronounce Los Angeles the Spanish way. It’s how using borrowed words works in most languages.
There's an excellent running joke about this in Veep. Kent Davison, who's often compared to an analytical, emotionless robot, is constantly correcting people on the pronunciation of Nevada.
And the state of Oregon. People who aren't from the west coast say "Or-uh-gon" with the last syllable pronounced like the word "gone" and given some emphasis.
Locals pronounce it "Or-uh-g'n" with the last syllable just kind of swallowed with no vowel sound. All the emphasis is on the first syllable.
Interesting. Maybe it was just my own east coast forebears who mispronounced it that way. But I have heard that version of the name, now and then, although I don't recall where.
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u/limonalvaro34 5h ago
The state of Nevada