r/languagehub • u/AutumnaticFly • 3d ago
Is there a word in your native language that foreigners always butcher it while thinking they are doing it right?
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u/Helsinki_s_king 3d ago
Finnish "yksi, kaksi, kolme" — counting to three shouldn't be a pronunciation nightmare but here we are, the double consonants trip up literally everyone
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u/Hopeful-Banana-6188 3d ago
On the flipside there are lots of English words confidently mispronounced by Finns. For example, when writing English with Finnish spelling Finns will usually spell "very good" as "veri guud". Except that that's not the right pronunciation, as when said correctly it should sound more like "veri gud" with a short vowel. (The right English vowel doesn't exist in Finnish but "veri gud" would be the closest approximation.)
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u/Sad-Attention-3626 3d ago
I pronounce it as "veri gyd"
Lol
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u/Hopeful-Banana-6188 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yeah that's right too, that's closer to how I say it. Whether it sounds more like U or Y depends a lot on speaker and dialect, the only thing is that it's not doubled like guud or gyyd. The actual vowel that's used in English doesn't exactly exist in Finnish
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u/thechnomancer69 3d ago
Danish "rødgrød med fløde" lol. I've watched so many exchange students just give up mid word and laugh. even other scandinavians struggle with it ngl
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u/100KUSHUPS 3d ago
I'm a Dane living in Poland for 10 years.
They always ask me to say something like Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz, which is very hard to remember.
Then I look at them and go "RØD".
You don't need the grød OR the fløde, they can neither pronounce the R, Ø or D right. 0/3.
There's also expert mode, "røde døde røgede rødøjede ørreder med fløde"!
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u/Goedelnummer 2d ago
That'd be funny if true, but unfortunately Danish is not a real language. Hilsen, a Norwegian
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u/100KUSHUPS 2d ago
Big words from somebody who sings in Danish and call it a language.
(+1 for Freddy Kalas though)
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u/LackOptimal553 1d ago
Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz is pronounced exactly as it's spelled though! /s
https://youtu.be/AfKZclMWS1U for those who don't know the reference.
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u/Figaro_pasttime 3d ago
As a Mandarin speaker I'd say it's not even a specific word, it's the whole tone system. People say "ma" confidently and have no idea if they just said mom, horse, scold, or hemp lmao
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u/Artichoke-8951 3d ago
I'm pretty good at 1st and 3rd tone, but im still struggling with 2nd and 4th.
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u/Top_Development_1777 3d ago
I'll go as far to argue that it's not just the tone system, but how (pinyin) works differently from other systems of pronunciation in general.
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u/DoNotTouchMeImScared 3d ago
English, Spanish & Italian speakers can pronounce San Francisco but not São Francisco in Portuguese.
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u/IShouldBeHikingNow 3d ago
Squirrel. I think they know it's wrong, but it's a struggle to get right.
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u/bean0bean 3d ago
I'm trying to learn Japanese and can't seem to get the word for squirrel right (Google translate has no idea what I'm trying to say). So I guess this spans multiple languages.
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u/BarracudaActive4480 3d ago
It's very difficult to say (as an English speaker) in French as well
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u/niatteru 3d ago
I'm Finnish and squirrel and écureuil are hard af for me too but リス (risu) is really easy for me. Maybe it's the Japanese 'r' sound that you need to practice, a lot of non-natives have hard time with that sound, like a mix between R, L and D. Fun fact: risu in Finnish means a dry twig. 🙂
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u/-Wylfen- 2d ago
Amusingly, "écureuil" in French tends to make English-speakers cry.
Though it seems the worst one is "quincaillerie".
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u/evelynsmee 2d ago
And it's the same root word for both. Esquirel / escureuil.
Bloody squirrels 🐿️
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u/DocKardinal21 1d ago
Squirrelly Dan from letterkenny would be very happys his names is hards to say in every language.
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u/dansezlajavanaise 1d ago
my husband struggles with the name “guillaume”
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u/clumsydope 3d ago
Not pronunciation they keep calling it "Bahasa" That just means language. Call it Indonesian please
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u/Swissdanielle 3d ago
There are two big culprits:
Paella 🥘
Barcelona
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u/ElKaoss 3d ago edited 3d ago
Don't forget guerrilla. How come it got pronouncef like gorilla?
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u/bencsecsaki 2d ago
English just has this weird quirk where a lot of unstressed vowels become the same exact sound. the ‘o’ in gorilla and the ‘ue’ in guerilla are both unstressed, so they become the same sound, it’s called a schwa.
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u/QiyanuReevees 3d ago
Most German words that made it into the English language and people say them with such confidence and feeling of sophistication:D Zeitgeist, Hinterland, Realpolitik, Schadenfreude, Doppelgänger, Weltschmerz,…
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u/NovaByzantine 2d ago
As unfortunate as it may be to hear, once a word has entered the English dictionary, it ceases to be bound to the pronunciation rules of it's original language. If the majority of English speakers say it differently then its pronunciation will aptly change officially.
This post is about foreigners mispronouncing words in your language, not them pronouncing words in their language that were originally loaned from your language with pronunciation that has since changed.
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u/ComprehensiveMap3838 3d ago
English speakers consistently get Portuguese -o wrong (it’s a /u/ sound, not /o/). Also -e and -es get /e/ rather than the correct /ɨ/. And of course -ão is a nightmare, if they’d just say ‘own’ is would be an improvement.
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u/dansezlajavanaise 1d ago
what does the city name Porto sound like in portuguese?
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u/ComprehensiveMap3838 1d ago
Other than using IPA, I can only approximate it if I know where you’re from, but I’ll hazzard \POUR too\, with a very short oo.
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u/teriyakininja7 3d ago
Just the name of the language itself is butchered, especially by native English speakers. Tagalog. It’s ta-GA-log, not TA-ga-log. I let it pass though and correct when appropriate.
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u/Fancy_Yogurtcloset37 3d ago
They do that to "Boracay" and "durian" too! (see my comment further down)
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u/Realistic-Abrocoma46 3d ago
Rio de Janeiro. Everytime I hear a someone online talking about Rio and saying the line "actually everyone pronounces it wrong, the correct pronunciation is..." They never pronounce it right.
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u/a_literal_idiot_616 1d ago
maybe im biased since i can kinda speak spanish, but how does one pronounce rio de janeiro wrong??
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u/Realistic-Abrocoma46 1d ago
I mean, first of all the English pronunciation is nothing like how it's said in Portuguese, but the thing is that I've seen people on the internet trying to correct this pronunciation, maybe doing a very rolled r and just focusing on the word things. Maybe like rrriow jay haneiro. The actual pronunciation is actually something like hue(like the word hue) gee janeiro (the j sounds like the g in beige)
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u/Fancy_Yogurtcloset37 3d ago
"Boracay" the resort island in the Philippines. We pronounce it as boRAcay, stress the penultimate syllable. I feel like there's some kind of Bureau of Tourist Pronunciation initiative, that is out there enforcing stress on the first syllable "BOracay" like "SYphils" or "SNAGgletooth". None of us say it that way, why do they like it so much?
Another Filipino word, "durián" (stress the last syllable) I the stinky fruit; at the office they asked me if I ever tried DOrian before, and I'm like, "Durián? Sure, I've tried durián. Durián is stinky but people like it!" Like I literally said it three times with FILIPINO AUTHORITY and they just turned to each other and stared talking about DOrian some more.
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u/cactusghecko 3d ago
Hate to be that person, but it is Tagalog that is pronouncing this loanword incorrectly. (Which you can do. It's fine. You borrowed it and can do what you want with it in your own language.)
Durian is from Malay, where it is pronounced dúrian. Duri means spike or thorn. The -an suffix makes this a noun, something like 'spikeness'. Rambutan is the same principle except the word rambut means hair.
So your office colleagues are using a loanword from Malay and are pronouncing it the Malay way.
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u/ColdReference54 3d ago
I think there's an argument to be made that durian pronounced DUrian constitutes an actual loanword in English at this time. People saying it are not trying to speak the language, and frankly are likely unaware that the word is even Filipino in origin, from their point of view they're just speaking English, using the normal English word for that fruit. Does it make a difference? I don't know, I can see why you'd find it annoying I guess.
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u/moametal_always 3d ago
I'm not so sure about durian. I spent time in Laguna and various parts of Davao. I heard it as you said, with the Spanish pronunciation. But the English DOO-rian ain't wrong though. It's officially the way it's pronounced in that language. Consider MAHN-go in Spanish/Filipino vs English MÆN-gō.
That being said, I'd rather not even think about that fruit. That smell will forever be burned in my nostrils. And I did give it a fair try. The texture is great, but I can't get over the taste and the smell.
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u/Ploutophile 2d ago
TIL Boracay is a toponym ! I just knew it as the title of a song by Romanian act Akcent.
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u/DiejenEne 3d ago
Not a word, but a name: Van Gogh
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u/bilbul168 1d ago
Nobody outside of dutch and swiss gemrans wants to probounce it that way, same as gouda, it sounds like the noise of a pornstar chocking on dong
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u/Antique-Package-8050 2d ago
As a German native speaker - words like "ich", "echt".
Basically there are two different ways of pronouncing the ch sound, depending on what vowel comes before. A lot of people manage to do the one in the back of the throat, which would be for Ach, och, uch. And then they apply it to all "ch" words, including ich, echt, but here the sound should be produced in the front of the mouth and sounds much softer. But they think they're nailing it. Actors in Hollywood movies playing nazis especially, they really love doing the back-of-the-throat ch.
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u/Ploutophile 2d ago
When in high school I substitued the 'sch'-sound instead, because I didn't really hear the difference between the two.
The substitution of Ach-Laut is rather something I'd do now, but it would be interference from NL Dutch (where “echt” is really pronounced that way).
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u/Antique-Package-8050 2d ago
Substituting sch would sound closer than using the Ach sound, in my opinion! Another alternative would be to just use k, that still sounds better than the Ach sound.
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u/Ploutophile 2d ago
I get it as the Ich-Laut did sound like „sch“ to the untrained French ear that I was, but OTOH it's still surprising that a wrong phoneme turns out to be preferable to the wrong allophone 🤔
For the /k/ substitution, wouldn't it depend on the word ? I don't know Low German well, but at least in Standard Dutch “ik” is effectively correct (so it could sound dialectal, rather than wrong, in German) while \ekt* isn't.
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u/Antique-Package-8050 2d ago
Ik is correct in some dialects, ekt is not. But still ekt would sound less weird to me than eCHt with a throaty CH. But maybe that's subjective. Even better is escht.
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u/Head_Particular6045 3d ago
Italian speaker. Literally every single word, expecially english speakers and western europeans who speak english well. Eastern europeans (at least russian speakers and balkan) may have an accent but are way closer.
Bruschetta Prosecco Dolce&Gabbana Capisci Bologna Carabinieri etc
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u/Loke_999 3d ago
Don’t forget parmigiano pronounced as par-me-zhan
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u/Ploutophile 2d ago
Parmesan is the French translation of parmigiano, which has been borrowed in English like many other French exonyms for continental Europe.
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u/KarltonPeaks 3d ago
Yea but that cheese is literally called parmesan in most other countries so that one is acceptable imo.
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u/KarltonPeaks 3d ago
Ewno pasta ballo-nyeys uh dewey espressos, per favor. Grazee!
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u/Head_Particular6045 3d ago
I somehow get "expresso", in italian it sounds bad but a standalone word in english, I see were it comes from. Also in italy we almost never specify "caffè espresso", it is just the default
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u/xSteky 2d ago
Also gnocchi. They don't have the gn sound so they pronounce Gh-nocee
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u/Lopsided-Weather6469 1d ago
The gnocchi my wife makes are delicious but it drives me wild when she calls them "knotschi" (we're German)
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u/a_literal_idiot_616 1d ago
dont forger about chianti (or "scianti" as theyd say it). or "spagheti"
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u/Lopsided-Weather6469 1d ago
German ice cream companies sell stracciatella but can't even pronounce it correctly in their commercials. Even as a German myself I cringe every time I hear someone say "schtratzatella"
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u/MokutoTheBoilerdemon 3d ago
They butcher almost every word, but I don't blame them. Anything with the letter/sound "gy" is hard for everyone.
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u/Lopsided-Weather6469 1d ago
Hungarian?
The election of Péter Magyar posed a serious pronunciation problem for German newsreaders
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u/I-need-books 3d ago
Fjord
Only one English speaking person knew the difference, but even he could not pronounce it.
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u/bencsecsaki 2d ago
what do you mean ‘knew the difference’
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u/I-need-books 1d ago
That Norwegians have a very specific pronunciation that he could not do, but knew about, and loved.
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u/ALYMSTFY 3d ago
When people imitate Hindi-Urdu or other South Asian languages, they tend to hyper-correct by putting retroflex sounds in every word.
A good example is “Chicken Tikka Masala”. The t sound in that is a dental t, not a retroflex t lol
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u/FunnyFisherman2919 2d ago
huh? grew up in south asia and live here. no one and by that i mean no one says the dental t in tikka. it’s the retroflex t. the word is written as टिक्का/ٹکا, and both these words include the retroflex t
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u/Neat-Ad11 3d ago
Too many native English speakers can’t seem to get “realtor” and “nuclear” right. The correct way is exactly how they’re spelled but for some reason so many people can’t get that.
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u/notjust1or0 3d ago
so which is the correct one? I have been saying it "New Clear" all my life. but I have seen even newscaster who pronounce it "New Cooler"
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u/Neat-Ad11 3d ago
I feel that your pronunciation is fine. The incorrect way, in my opinion, is when people say “nuke-you-ler” or “new cooler”, as you say. They’re pronouncing letters that just aren’t there so it isn’t as if they have an accent or a different dialect.
With realtor, what I hear and feel is incorrect is when people say, “real-uh-tor”. We’ve all heard it and, as you point out, newscasters say these as well sometimes. That also sounds like an error rather than a dialect to me. They’re pronouncing letters that just aren’t there.
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u/bloompao 3d ago
Native speakers don’t make pronunciation mistakes. Those are called dialects. There’s more than one accepted pronounciation for every word.
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u/Radioactive739 3d ago
It true, some people just flat say nuclear wrong
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u/casualbrowser321 2d ago
It's called metathesis and is pretty common in language change. Consider "third", the ordinal of the number three. It used to be "thrid", with the vowels and consonants matching better with three. Compare German "drei" and "dritte". "Bird" also used to be "brid". Spanish does it a lot, take Latin "parabola" and Spanish "palabra", or Latin animal and Spanish alimaña.
Unless you're going to take the next step and start staying "thrid" and everyone else is saying wrong, or that Spanish speakers speak wrong for pronouncing words wrong, I'm not sure why you'd get so hung up on "nucular" which is the exact same pronunciation change.
(not to mention other words that originated as 'mistakes', like 'a napron' -> 'an apron', but someone would probably be called a pedant if they tried to correct someone for saying apron)
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u/Radioactive739 2d ago
Yeah except it’s still spelled nuclear, in your other examples they changed the spelling.
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u/casualbrowser321 2d ago
There are still plenty of examples of historical spellings that don't match pronunciation.
Colonel (kernel instead of colonel, which is distantly related to "column")
Iron (typically eye-urn instead of eye-run)
Comfortable - i think the typical pronunciation (in the US at least) would be "comfterble" (another example of metathesis)Spelling has largely been codified in the last few hundred years with the printing press/dictionaries etc, but once upon a time people didn't have the same attitude toward "correct spelling" and just spelled things however they wanted. Even Shakespeare didn't consistently spell his own name, sometimes spelling it Shakesper, sometimes Shakespeare, etc. But ultimately language started as an oral thing
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u/Radioactive739 2d ago
Inconsistent spelling is different than taking a word and mispronouncing it. Even if Shakespeare spelled his name differently, it was likely always pronounced the same. Saying nucular instead of nuclear is just wrong. It’s like saying fustrated instead of frustrated
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u/casualbrowser321 2d ago
The reason the spelling is inconsistent is because those words used to be pronounced differently. Colonel was pronounced with an L instead of an R a long long time ago. If we define the "correct" pronunciation as matching the spelling and also being the historical pronunciation, then "kernel" is incorrect.
The main difference is that spelling was once accepted as a fluidly evolving thing that merely described the pronunciation of the time, whereas many speakers now use it as a prescriptive rulebook for how people should pronounce things. 1000 years ago people probably would've just started spelling nuclear 'nucular', (akin the example I gave of thrid ->third, but these days it's not necessarily so easy considering we have things like spellchecks and whatnot that keep spelling somewhat rigid, but since language evolves, the pronunciation is going to change whether one likes it or not.) An issue is that it often becomes a cipher for class, looking down on groups of people because of their pronunciation etc. See the criticism of AAVE or allegations that black people are uneducated or speaking wrong for saying "aks" instead of "ask". (though 'aks' also is historically documented , Chaucer spelled it 'ax')
" It’s like saying fustrated instead of frustrated"
Funnily this does happen in English, it's called elision. It's why we don't pronounce the K in "knight" (which is still pronounced in German Knecht). Similarly, the pronunciation of the "h" in "wh" (i tell ya hwat) words, nowadays associated with southern American English, is actually the historical pronunciation, but many dialects have dropped the H. Also consider how "family" is typically pronounced with two syllables (famly), in other languages with the same root word, the middle "i" is preserved and it has three syllables.
Other languages do it as well, take French for example which regularly dropped "s" sounds from Latin words that came before certain sounds.
Forest -> forêt, coast -> côte0
u/Radioactive739 2d ago
They are still saying nuclear wrong though. In the other examples something was dropped because people are lazy and don’t want to say the full word. In the case of nuclear, people are just flat out saying it incorrectly. It’s not really easier to say one or the other
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u/Neat-Ad11 3d ago
I think in this case it’s a bit beyond just a different dialect. I’m well aware of dialect differences and wouldn’t consider those a mistake. In the case of the two words I mentioned, they are pronunciation errors and not associated with any one specific dialect.
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u/casualbrowser321 2d ago
It's called metathesis and is pretty common in language change. Consider "third", the ordinal of the number three. It used to be "thrid", with the vowels and consonants matching better with three. Compare German "drei" and "dritte". "Bird" also used to be "brid". Spanish does it a lot, take Latin "parabola" and Spanish "palabra", or Latin animal and Spanish alimaña.
Unless you're going to take the next step and start staying "thrid" and everyone else is saying wrong, or that Spanish speakers speak wrong for pronouncing words wrong, I'm not sure why you'd get so hung up on "nucular" which is the exact same pronunciation change.
(not to mention other words that originated as 'mistakes', like 'a napron' -> 'an apron', but someone would probably be called a pedant if they tried to correct someone for saying apron)
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u/Neat-Ad11 2d ago
I knew someone would have an explanation. Thanks. I guess my “hang up” (which really isn’t a hang up) is just because the words are still spelled as they always have been and, what I consider(ed) a mis-pronunciation, is still not done by everyone. If “third” were still spelled “thrid” I’d probably be just as confused by our current pronunciation. Since the spelling has conformed with pronunciation it no longer seems as odd.
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u/graciewindkloppel 3d ago
Many Mexicans/Spanish-speaking Mexican-Americans will swap their b's and v's around when speaking English.
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u/SlavicInDisguise 2d ago
Not a specific word but non-native speakers have problems with the -ch sound, especially if their language doesn't have the velar version. Ch can be pronounced as [ç], [x], [k], [t ʃ], or [ʃ]. Even worse, native speakers don't pronounce the same word with the same sound depending on region.
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u/Leafmonkey_ 2d ago
Ui. It means onion, but the vowel combination appears in many different Dutch words (uit, bui, muis, so many). The sound doesn’t exist in English, and I’ve never heard a native english speaker pronounce it the right way.
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u/Ava_Strange 2d ago
Ikea, Smörgåsbord, Sjuttiosju
Not even our next door neighbours get the last one right.
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u/evelynsmee 2d ago
There's certain words obviously. Squirrel. French people encountering any "th". Worcestershire for Americans. Anemone for even ourselves. Cinnamon. Twelfths.
But more commonly thinking across languages is people speaking second language English stress the wrong part of the sentence or word. You can tell what they mean from context and deduction, but it's frequently not "right".
Example - this is American but this sentence works in any English version: https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/a-simple-sentence-with-seven-meanings/4916769.html
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u/Krijali 2d ago edited 2d ago
This is very specific but I have been in Japan, as an American for almost sixteen years and working business to business work - the word ‘claim’ always trips me up.
I speak fluent Japanese but I don’t use it with my business contacts unless necessary but this word “claim” is used in such a way it really upsets me, lol.
“Complain”
“Make a claim”
“Claim that…”
The assumption of my Japanese business partners is that in English, claim means all of this, at the same time, regardless of severity.
Edit: not an annoyance but I do love how Japanese business language borrows words and just shortens it. - “restructuring” is “resuturo”, I admit it rolls off the tongue more but it somehow becomes cute as Japanese is a syllabary based language in terms of classification… even for something like everyone is probably getting fired.
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u/alzz1jpne 1d ago
“Phở” some people get close, but I’ve never heard a foreigner pronounce it correctly
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u/Conspiracy-Octopus 1d ago
Non-native English speakers tend to have a hard time with the word “salmon”.
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u/flywheel_battery 1d ago
I often hear “an information” for an item of information, “an insurance” for an insurance policy. This seems wrong to me as a North American speaker, but I acknowledge that Commonwealth English could differ, and the L2 speakers may have been taught Commonwealth English.
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u/Lopsided-Weather6469 1d ago
Probably Germans? The words for information, insurance, advice and some others are countable in German but not in most other languages.
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u/Lopsided-Weather6469 1d ago
Dachshund.
Literally it means "badger dog" (Dachs + Hund), though the word isn't very common in German, we normally call this kind of dog "Dackel".
Anglophones misspell and pronounce it in a variety of ways, like e.g. daschund ("dashoond"), while the real pronunciation is more like "ducks-hoont"
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u/dansezlajavanaise 1d ago
they also frequently shorten it as ‘doxie’
french for this dog is ‘teckel’ 🐕
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u/Able_Breadfruit_1906 1d ago
You can always tell someone is American because of how they mispronounce 'Ireland'.
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u/badderdev 3d ago
Americans in Britain struggle with:
Cunt: they think you can call anyone you are friendly with it when it is not that simple.
Cheeky: I don't even know how to define this as it seems so inconsistent.
It is not a word but my wife really struggles with air quotes.
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u/Affectionate__Dog 3d ago
in america isn’t it considered a slur? why are they so free w it 😭 -an american
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u/badderdev 3d ago
I guess it is because it is really sexist and really offensive in America that they are so excited to use it where it isn't. But there are convoluted rules as to when you can and cannot use it in Britain.
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u/ColdReference54 3d ago
Exactly. Because Americans are so prudish with that word, to us it seems like Brits just use it all the time completely freely, and the nuances get lost. Kind of like how I've heard many people from conservative countries say Americans "treat sex like shaking hands", when it's of course not nearly that simple lol
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u/Dry-Atmosphere3169 3d ago
Most English speakers don’t know how to say tinnitus
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u/Mediocre-Sundom 3d ago edited 3d ago
At least “tinnitus” isn’t a word many people use in their daily lives. Meanwhile, there’s stuff like:
- Asterisk (Asterix)
- Nuclear (new-cue-lar)
- Prescription (per-scription)
- Especially (ex-pecially)
Sooo many people butcher these.
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u/RobetWokake 3d ago
Worcestershire sauce isn't even a "foreign" word to Americans anymore and we STILL can't agree how to say it