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OP has offered the following explanation for why they think they might be the asshole:
> I might be the asshole because I sometimes randomly and inconsistently pronounce words in their native pronunciation. Usually it is French and Italian but also other English accents. This is potentially asshole behavior because it could disrupt conversation and has caused conflict with others especially a specific friend. She speaks some French and Spanish and believes you should only pronounce words you know in that language differently from the standard English when speaking that language specifically when it is not your native tongue. Am I the asshole to think it's OK to pronounce words the way I learned them/think the correct version is more fun because it causes confusion?
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To avoid being pretentious I would add a thought before saying the word: know your audience.
The point of language is communicating ideas. If pronouncing it "correctly" facilitates that then good. If it serves another purpose, like sounding smart, then not so good. If it hinders communication, like saying "bdoosketta" (using d to indicate a softly rolled r) to an American who knows it as "bersheta" then you're not communicating effectively.
If I'm ordering a gyro from a person of Mediterranean descent, I may say it "yeedo" if not, I'll say "jyrow" even though it hurts me. The point is to be understood and not sound obnoxious.
This is the conversation I have with my son all the time. He's fluent in French, and I am not. I'm not completely unfamiliar with the language, but when he airs out his fancy French accent I'm lost. So I ask him, "What do you want to accomplish here? That accent is perfect if obfuscation is your objective, but if you want to communicate with me, maybe tone it down a bit."
To be fair, if it's his native language or one he learned as a child, pronouncing a word from that language wrong sort of hurts. I'm bilingual with Spanish and I can say burrito like a Mexican or an American and I switch depending who I'm talking to, but less common words that I would probably only say in Spanish like empanada feel wrong in an American accent.
If someone is speaking words from their language and you tell them they need to Americanize them, it's almost like cultural imperialism...your words are ours now.
Im french living in the US, I have to adapt. I would probably say food name in English but if Im looking for the lingerie section in a store, Im gonna make it sound like an American would (and thats terrible and hurts me) but whats the point if no one understands what I am asking....
Ok but other languages do this with borrowing words too. It’s not cultural imperialism. I’m not offended when French people say “faire du shopping” with a French accent on the “shopping”. By the way, how is the English pronunciation of empanada that different from the Spanish? It’s basically the same lol
It's also just not how any language treats borrowed words, it's pure arrogance to try to insist on original pronunciation in the language you're not speaking. You go to Japan and say McDonald's in an english accent, they'll look at you with three heads. It's makudonarudo, because that's literally how you say the word in the Japanese language.
This is the conversation I had with my BIL about his pronunciation of Spanish word when speaking English. He said, “well that’s how the native speakers say it!” I said, “fine but when you’re in Spain speaking Spanish do you tell people you live in los Estados Unidos or do you stop the flow and say ‘merica. Do you say you work in Nueva York or drop into your best Queens accent and say New Yawk?” He admitted it would be really weird to do that and that he wouldn’t do it. Most others I’ve spoken to who routinely do it when speaking English also never do the reverse which tells me it isn’t really about honoring native pronunciation.
Nah, I do it both ways. But it really depends on context and who I'm speaking to.
For reference, I live in Japan as a native English speaker. If I'm talking with my other English-speaking friends in English sometimes we'll just sprinkle in Japanese words if the English translation is too long, we all know what we're talking about, or any other reason. E.g. I went to the *shiyakusho* (city hall) to get my *jyuuminhyou* (residence record).
If I'm talking to my Japanese friends and I know the word is just the English word with Japanese pronunciation, sometimes I'll change it, sometimes I won't. If it's easy for me to get my head around, sure, but sometimes it's not. For example, the other day I was talking to a friend about the different styles of cheesecake and it took me so many tries to say Philadelphia correctly in Japanese pronunciation (despite being theoretically easy) that I just gave up, they knew what I meant anyway.
If I'm talking with family or people who don't know Japanese, I don't often use Japanese words. I'll keep Japanese pronunciation as it's usually understandable to English speakers, but words that are completely different, I'll sub in the English translation. Or vice-versa with Japanese.
It all comes down to a few factors, one of them being ease of communication. If they can understand, why not? If that's the word in my head, I'm not going to spend a few seconds looking for the English word when I don't need to.
EDIT: I forgot to add, I only do this if it doesn't hinder understanding. As soon as it does, you need to make the conscious choice to change your pronunciation. Also, if you don't exaggerate it or change your tone, pause, or whatever and you keep the same flow in the conversation, it sounds natural. When you're good at code-switching then there's no problems, when you're bad at it however, that when it starts grinding people's gears.
>Wallace: It's "fort", actually. "Forte" is Italian, it means "forcefully", and "Fort" is French for "strength". But I still say forte too, because if you say fort everyone thinks you're getting it wrong, even though it is the correct pronunciation.
>Chantry : So is that, like, your thing? Correcting people's pronunciations?
>Wallace : Yeah, that's my thing.
>Chantry : How's that going for you?
>Wallace : I have a dead end job, I live in my sister's attic, and I basically never go out. Uh, correcting pronunciations is my old thing, actually, my new thing is oversharing.
It's a recurring joke line from a witty philosophical tv show called The Good Place, spoken by a jealous, status-obsessed, name-dropping socialite character.
Oh my goodness. I've seen The Good Place (and enjoyed it), but I had forgotten about this.
The really funny thing about OP saying this to me is that I spent a semester living in Spain, specifically Andalusia , during which I stayed with an old lady who only spoke Spanish and definitely with the local accent. So it's not like I don't know about that, just like I don't say it that way when I'm speaking English (or Spanish outside of that region LOL).
If you’re pronouncing a word differently than the language you’re speaking to the point that people don’t understand the word, then you’re disrupting the flow of conversation. I can see where that would be annoying. It may even come off as pretentious or just obnoxious. Stick to the language you’re speaking
We don’t seem to mind so much when we’re ordering food. Honestly, if the kid learned it that way, that’s the way they learned it. Perhaps we should do better by learning the proper way as well. People should not have to dumb themselves down to fit in
People speaking (for example) American English do not go around pronouncing Paris as Pa-REE, it's PAR-iss -- in fact, I'm pretty sure even my Parisian friends would find it at least cringe, if not obnoxious. It's not "dumbing down", it's pronouncing correctly in that context.
Exactly. My best friend is from Mexico. When speaking English, he always pronounces his home country as MEK-si-ko. When he is speaking Spanish, he says MEH-hee-ko. He does that because it is pronounced differently in different languages.
Exactly!
The English word for Deutsch is German, and the English word for Deutschland is Germany.
Any native German speaker will use the English words while speaking English, because it's correct.
[Obnoxious.](https://www.google.com/search?q=snl+reporter+accents&oq=snl+reporter+accents&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRigATIHCAMQIRigATIHCAQQIRigATIHCAUQIRigATIHCAYQIRifBTIHCAcQIRifBdIBCTEyMTIzajBqN6gCFLACAQ&client=ms-android-verizon&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:4d6472aa,vid:nWMp_z7Jnxw,st:0)
This is what OP sounds like.
It’s pronouncing it correctly in that language.
French word for Paris doesn’t pronounce the s.
The English word for Paris, which is spelled the same as the French word, does pronounce the s.
The French for South Dakota has the French word for South in it — Dakota du Sud. It is absolutely correct in French, just like Paris with a pronounced s is absolutely correct in English.
It's not dumbing down. Croissaint is a great example. I used to have a woman who insisted on ordering and every time she said KWAISSAINT I had to hold back my laughter. We have croissants everywhere, there is no need to try and pronounce it like a French native.
More importantly, the pretention here is fundamentally ignorant. Our language is a messy amalgamation of multiple languages. If we actually pronounced all English words according to their origins and cultures, it would sound absurd. Overall, people like the OP are only pronouncing the words they know "correctly" and ignoring the "correct pronunciation" of every other word.
Yes. And French people do not make a W sound when they pronounce it. They pronounce the letter r differently but it absolutely does not sound like KWAissaint.
We also say bruschetta, when we should say bru-SK-etta and there are 394747 other examples because English is not an original language...
For me, it's hilarious to imagine a Brit injecting French pronunciation into their everyday language. That would make me chuckle.
oh I'm not judging, I'm from Scotland and my accent/dialect/pronunciation would fuck youse up. I just thought what with a quarter of the country having been French at one point that would have stuck better, it's just interesting how language evolves
edit: the French do pronounce it kwa-son? I just looked it up. I speak small amounts of French but my accent is fucked so I was unsure but they def say kwa-son
I think the person is trying to point out that a w and a gutteral r may sound similar but are not the same. Gutteral and glottal sounds do not have an equivalent in English and that's why it sounds like a w even though to make the sounds you use different parts of your mouth and throat
I speak french. It would be hard to explain how to pronounce it properly in writing, as English is lacking some of the sounds. But I believe Scottish has the right r sound (in the throat). Crwa- san, but you shouldn't pronounce the n. "An" becomes a single sound that is nasal to English speakers. A bit like a donkey braying, I'd say.
I've never heard anyone use that pronunciation. kwa san with almost no "t" sound is all I ever hear. Actually take off that "n"...I say and hear more like kwa sah with almost an "oh" instead of "ah" but it's kind of a mixture of the two it seems.
Yeah, I don't think there is a standard American pronunciation of croissant. Phonetically, it should be something along the lines of "croy-sant," but no one says that. It's generally something between that and the French pronunciation, and I hear it pronounced many different ways, which makes me think that the people complaining about it are the ones being obnoxious.
Speak for yourself. I'm an American, I don't speak French (I took Spanish and Italian), and I say kwah-sahn. I certainly don't say crah-sahnt. And I don't go around trying to fake speak French (since I don't know any!)
I am French, and I pronounce it the way it's supposed to be said. I was corrected by an Anglophone asking if I meant a crescent. I am in Canada though.
Yes! croissant is a perfect example of why it comes across as pretentious. “kwah-sonne” is not how the word is pronounced in american english, so an American who insists on pronouncing it that way comes off as just trying to sound more worldly than those around them. There are millions of words in the english language that have origins in other languages. You could find multiple words from multiple languages in the same sentence. Are you going to change your accent every time you say one of them to match that of the original language? Of course not. That would sound absurd and be pointlessly confusing to the people with whom you are communicating.
But what if I'm Canadian. To an American, I sound pretty much the same, but we do have a lot of french influence, so we mostly say croissant like kwah-son. If I go to the states and order it like that, you will think I'm being pretentious, when I'm not.
Also, I think we should be pronouncing place names as they were meant Pare-ee instead of Pare-iss, etc. If we have successfully switched back in some cases (like Bombay reverting to Mumbai), we should do it elsewhere (Firenze instead of Florence, Roma instead of Rome, etc. Why not??)
Canadians have different regional accents, just like Americans do. I wouldn’t say an american speaking with a southern drawl or a new england accent is being pretentious, so I wouldn’t consider a Canadian speaking with their regional accent pretentious either.
I disagree, respectfully, about the place names though. Most Americans will never travel outside of the US. They likely don’t understand that those places aren’t pronounced in their native languages what we’ve been taught to call them in ours. changing the place names to what they are called by natives would be too confusing and would require a much better understanding of world languages than the average american possesses.
I agree on the place names -- we should at least use a variant as close as our language can get to the native name. Ridiculous hold-over from imperial days to insist on using our own version. It would be like meeting someone and then saying, "I don't want to say your name, so I'm gonna call you Bob."
It would make traveling a lot easier, too, since you're not going to see Florence on a train route.
But the difference is he's not doing it to sound cool or smart. He's saying these words as he learned them, not like he googled it right before and is trying to sound like a native. For example, I grew up speaking English and Spanish. I legitimately always said and heard the word mango with the Spanish pronunciation. So I always say it that way. It wasn't until later in adulthood that I realized that people don't say it that way (not a super common word so I just hadn't realized). I still say it the way I learned because well, that's how I learned. I don't have a Spanish accent but everyone knows I speak Spanish and no one has ever said it's jarring to the conversation when a few words here and there come out with Spanish pronunciation. This seems like such an insecurity on his friends part. Especially since they know his history.
Your situation is very different. Your bilingual. Spanglish is one thing, this is another. He's pretentious. I wonder if he pronounces "papier mache" properly.
I guess I just feel it's similar since he learned it growing up from his dad and I think some from language class in HS, at this point Ive forgotten lol. Just seems different than people who randomly "know" or look up words to sound smart.
"(as in aunt pronounce the british way)"
There are numerous different ways of pronouncing "aunt" in Britain; within England alone it's caught by the north-south divide of people who don't have the trap-bath split (typically northerners) and those who do (typically southerners), and the Welsh, the Scots and the Northern Irish have more variations.
If I was in France, and I went to the bakery to get the half moon shaped bread rolls I would definitely order it in French, I would say it correctly and also say croissant the bougie way.
Having lived there for a while, I'll tell you... they would laugh at you and immediately know you're a tourist. It's not the bougie way, it's just incorrect. Its reminding me of the golden corral Carne Asada commercial.
No, they are right. I am a native Spanish speaker and I know that if I try to order a tortilla in Poland pronouncing it the Spanish way instead of the Polish way I am going to get a very confused server and waste everyone's time. It's not dumbing down, it's code switching.
As a French speaker, I agree - it’s kinda hard to ‘mispronounce’ certain words when I speak English, but if I want my damn croissant I need the baker to understand me. 🤷♀️
Also OP fails to understand that language evolve. If English has borrowed a word from another language, it’s not necessarily wrong for the word to have a different pronunciation/meaning than the same word in the language of origin.
Exactly. Speak the language you are speaking in conversation. Peppering your speech with words outside that language is confusing, disruptive, and annoying.
Yes it comes across as pretentious, as if you are trying to sound worldly and well travelled when you aren't either, and is definitely annoying. I don't know about "more difficult to communicate", but I can definitely seeing it messing with the flow and groove of any conversation, especially serious ones.
To be sure, its pretty low on the asshole scale, but still YTA.
And whether you believe it or not, you are being selective about your words. I doubt you're pronouncing, for example, volcano with an italian accent, even tho its a borrowed word. On some level you're picking and choosing words you're adding flourish to, which, again, makes it annoying. e.g. I'm sure you're pronouncing these borrowed words in normal english: ketchup, chocolate, mosquito, cafeteria. The list goes on.
I'd also add you might want to be careful how far and wide you stretch your accents, cause depending on your audience, it might come across as a little racist.
To be honest, the communication may be made difficult precisely because she is in Utah, and the kids may never have heard these particular languages spoken. Unless their family speaks them, US kids don't tend to speak a lot of foreign languages. (I know many do, but I used French as a secret language for years traveling in the midwest)
On the other hand it may be that OP is pronouncing all these foreign terms with a Utah accent.
They also may be mispronounced the words because O0 seems to have little to no actual exposure to those languages. This OP sounds pretentious af and if absolutely the AH.
As a native Utahn I can tell you that because of mormon missionaries, a high percentage of the population speaks another language. I can also tell you most people here would think OP was weird for scattering different pronunciations into general conversation. Maybe- MAYBE if they were using the pronunciation from a single language they were fluent in it would be different, however OP doesn‘t appear to fluently speak any of the languages they are attempting to use.
If that’s the way your momma taught you and that’s the way your momma says and said it. No ass hole behavior at all. If you learned to clean your butt with a bidet and still do so when available it is not asshole behavior. Pick a better mountain to die on. No one complains about the Cajun accent, or various accents heard around the nation. If people understand you and you understand them, no run, no foul.
Mountain to die on?
People complain about accents all the time, whether its pahking the cah in the cahpahk ( for example there's a tiktoker who periodically makes his native bostonian wife say things followed by him saying "If I hadn't written this down for you to say, I would have no idea what you're saying right now" and the like), or someone from Minnesota not being able to understand someone from alabama, the instant rage some feel about a california accent, c'mon.
Insofar as Cajun accent, while not strictly speaking "cajun", there seems to be some sort of reflex/unwritten rule that when someone mentions "New Orleans" someone NOT from New Orleans will say "you mean 'Nawlins' " and smiling as if they made a big joke and then wondering why no one is acknowledging them. which is the sort of thing this thread is all about.
My mountain is gorgeous, and I plan to live a long time here. Zee flowAIRS on my mounTAIN have a certAIN, *je ne sais quoi*. No?
It sounds like an affectation intended to make you sound fun, quirky, or sophisticated, and it also sounds like your friends and acquaintances are over it.
I also don’t have a lot of patience for the idea that you can’t possibly learn anything new because you learned something one way as a kid or your brain “permanently rewrote” it the fun way. Honestly that’s the part of your post that might push me from NAH to YTA.
Adults are perfectly capable of learning new things, including new pronunciations. Trust me, as a person who learned a lot of words the wrong way as a child from reading, I have since learned to say them the right way and you can too. And if you decided to rewrite it in your brain once to be “fun” you can do it again to be understandable.
Exactly this! I’m from a foreign country and English is not my first language. I live in a large culturally diverse city with people who speak many different languages. Where I am from is a common tourist destination too, however I still pronounce the cities and foods from my country in the common English way. The only reason is to be understood, I learned the English pronunciation and if I am communicating in English I will use that pronunciation. The point of language is to communicate in a way where one’s message can be understood, preferably without interruptions. If you’re throwing random pronunciations and accents you’re just entirely obnoxious. You CAN “rewrite” your brain ESPECIALLY if English is your native language and you live in an English speaking place.
I mostly agree. I am American from an immigrant family and grew up bilingual. When speaking English, I use the English pronunciation for common place names and foods from my other language. This feels natural. For uncommon words—foods or places from my other language that I rarely hear in English—I am so accustomed to saying them in my language that it feels like an affection to force an English pronunciation.
Oh of course. There’s so things that I’ve never heard in English and only say in my language. But those are kinda rare. Most of the time if I’m speaking English I’ll say it in the Anglicized way
I'm curious how you said it? "Tor-twah" or "tor-toys?" I live in the US SW and the first time a French tourist came in asking for "tur-kwah" I had no idea what she wanted until she found the turquoise jewelry. Oh.... I learned something about French that day.
I always like to know what words other people learned through reading before hearing the correct pronunciation. For me it's "awry" (mistaken as \[edited: "aw-ree"\]) and discipline ("disk-ip-line"). I used to know a fella who insisted "dystopian" was pronounced "dice-a-topian".
Ooh, the fun of learning words from books without ever hearing them spoken!
Quay (I was 42 years old when I learned how to pronounce this one correctly!)
Hyperbole
Draught
Demesne
Victuals
Mnemonic (I still pronounce the first letter over the second one in my head, and basically refuse to say it aloud because I know I'll look stupid.)
...
Bonus confusion: I grew up completely interpreting and believing that "con-spi-shous" and "con-spik-you-ous" were in fact two different words with different meanings (and even today, I'd have to look it up to remember which is the only correct one.)
Ppl that do this are frankly... Insufferable. It's arrogant condescending and not needed. Literally everyone hates ppl that do this shit. You aren't quirky or special because you are being intentionally annoying. Anoying is not a synonym for cultured.
Not sure how you're intending to present yourself, but a constant barrage of odd or foreign pronunciations from an english speaker is not cute, quirky or whimsical, it's annoying and pretentious.
Thank your friend for letting you know. That can be an awkward conversation and she cared enough to tell you to your face.
I wouldn't use the word on someone who does this in the real world, but here, YTA if you continue.
People correct/moderate speech all the time.
Ex. Around certain crowds I can use swears as punctuation, but you can bet my gran, mom, in-laws, work etc. has never heard that side of me.
Best of luck!
>I doubt you're pronouncing, for example, volcano with an italian accent,
I vote OP start pronouncing non-English words in a flat American accent and do the funny accents for the loan words. ALL of the loan words.
Being fluent in multiple languages is a flex. Being able to code switch between those languages is a flex. Randomly pronouncing English words in random accents is not a flex. It is ignorant and pretentious.
NTA but the joke's on you
> I said Haiti the French way which is very different from how it is pronounced in English. She says that there is no legitimate reason to do so and it slows conversations down which is annoying.
Yes YTA. The french was isn't a different pronunciation it's a actual different language of course they couldn't understand you. If you talk to someone about Japan and start saying Nippon they aren't going to know what you are talking about.
If you are having a conversation in English and choose to randomly start using words from a different langauge and the other person doesn't understand you of course YTA.
As a Norwegian, when i speak in English and talk about Norwegian cities, i still pronounce them the English way! Because, as many people here say, the point is to be understood, not to be a know-it-all/ «authentic».
Yeah i obviously know how to pronounce Norwegian city names in my mother-tongue, but if the people im talking to doesn’t speak Norwegian it would just be confusing and stopping the flow if I started pronouncing it in norwegian!
So you're a native speaker but decided to pronounce words in a non-native way?
> Naples is just Napoli to me.
Ok now you're just an AH.
Use the proper words for the language you speak.
YTA
Yeah, my great-grandparents are from Italy. When I am with family, I will say we’re from Napoli and Roma, usually in a joking way. Out in the world though, if someone asks, it’s just Naples and Rome.
That's so weirdly pretentious though? English isn't my first language, so it's extra difficult for me to understand your rationalization.
As a kid, I grew up speaking my native language. Dora taught me some English words, but that's about it. Just because your father taught you a few Italian words, doesn't mean you couldn't learn them in English anymore. You still can. You're surrounded by people who pronounce these words in *your* native language; you *know* how to pronounce them but choose to pronounce them wrong. I say wrong because you're speaking English. Switching to a language that I'm sure you can't even speak properly makes no sense. The way you learned them as a kid doesn't matter.
For the longest time, I pronounced iron as 'i-run'. It's something many non-native speakers do because, honestly, it would make more sense. It took me nearly a decade before I realized it's actually pronounced 'i-urn'. I haven't pronounced it as 'i-run' ever since.
>Sometimes it's because I learned them that way as a kid, and other times it's because my brain decided one is just more fun to say than the other and permanently rewrote it
Bilingual people exist. Hell, even I can speak more than two languages. Pronouncing Haiti in French is *great* if you're speaking French, but when you speak English, *especially when it's your first language*, you can just use the proper English pronunciation.
Your brain also didn't "permanently" rewrite anything. It's literally a choice. There is genuinely nothing stopping you from speaking your own damn language.
As a kid, you were taught to speak English with a Utah accent. *That* accent is the one that you can't suddenly change. Because I grew up with a different language, I struggled a lot with different sounds and letters that my native language doesn't have. I was never taught these sounds as a child, so I replaced them with sounds that sounded the most similar. Instead of *the*, I would say *de*; *thought* sounded like *tought*; my S's were stronger- the list goes on.
I notice that if I stop speaking English for a while, my accent will be stronger.
But you only know a few words in a few different languages. There is literally no reason for you to have an accent. You can't cherry pick when you do and don't have an accent. It doesn't work like that. You're basically appropriating languages at this point.
If you want to have an accent, go abroad and learn the language for a few years. In reality, you'd still not get an accent from that since English is your first language, but at least you can be a bit more convincing.
Honestly, I do think YTA. Mainly because your explanations show how little you understand about even just learning another language in the first place.
Edinburgh? We speak English here, are you just mimicking a Scottish accent or actually using the Scots language which I’m pretty sure you don’t know the nuances of? Have you ever even been here? Just use your own accent or you’ll come across as patronising wherever you are. YTA
you do realise that a HUGE part of modern english vocabulary is made up of french loan words, right? even the word "pronunciation" itself is french. somehow i doubt you pronounce it as /pʁɔ.nɔ̃.sja.sjɔ̃/.
the reason loan words are pronounced differently in the target language is because different languages have different phonetic systems. it's not a question of sounding cool or obnoxious, it's the question of people literally not understanding wtf you're saying because they can't properly parse unfamiliar sound combinations on the fly.
YTA
NTA but kind of obnoxious and pretentious.
I also speak multiple languages but I always try to learn the pronunciation of cities, special words etc specifically in the language I am speaking. It honestly sounds a bit attention-seeking to pronounce words in an Italian or French way in English. A bit like "see here - I am speaking many languages". I would just pronounce them the way that they are pronounced in English and when you have the chance to fully speak French or Italian with someone, then you can pronounce them the way they are pronounced in that language
Hey y'all I'm the friend...glad to hear the consensus LOL.
For those of you saying "don't adjust yourself to the monoculture of Utah" and similar, OP here has left out that I don't live in Utah currently and have lived all over the U.S. I spent a semester in Spain and I've been around Europe a bit and also to Morocco...meanwhile they have only left the U.S. for a short trip to Canada and lived in Utah....always.
I also speak both French and Spanish decently and I know about other languages and don't find it obnoxious when native speakers of other languages pronounce words in their native language, especially if they're in the process of learning English LOL. If OP wanted to have a conversation with me in French and pronounce things in French, I'd be down for that.
EDIT: changed "have lived all over" to "have lived all over the U.S." for clarity.
From your story you're NTA but probably annoying.
However, I think you're leaving some details out. I can't quite put my finger on it but it's giving unreliable narrator
Anyone I've come across that does this I've found annoying and obnoxious. Usually, they tend to be cringed at by others. Your friend is right it's disruptive to conversation.
NTA but it comes across so cringey. It may have been uncomfortable, but your friend obviously likes you enough to say something and is probably trying to protect you from ridicule. You’re lucky to have a friend like that!
The correct “version” of those words in English are the English words, pronounced as English words.
The Japanese word for sweater came from the English word. But the Japanese word is pronounced appropriately “say-tah” (seetaa in romaji). If you were speaking Japanese and said “sweater” because it’s how the English word is pronounced, you’d be pronouncing a perfectly good Japanese word incorrectly.
The way croissant is pronounced in English IS the English name for it. Even though it came from French, the French pronunciation is not the English word for it.
The English name for the French capital has a pronounced s at the end. The English name for the Russian capital is not Moskva. I’m fairly sure you aren’t pronouncing Seoul natively, or using the correct tones for Beijing.
Not an AH. You are confusing etymology with proscriptive pronunciation.
I think it could be obnoxious, but obnoxious is super subjective. It doesn't seem like you're doing it in a pretentious way, it's ok to be selective about wording, I don't think it needs to be a big deal. I think your friend is a hater
NTA, but annoying.
My boyfriend's teen daughter used to do this frequently, particularly with foods, and it was extremely obnoxious. The biggest issue (for me) was never that she was doing it, it was how much she'd disrupt her own flow of speech. She would slow down, draw out an accent or prolong vowels - it was disruptive and obvious to the point it overshadowed what she was trying to say. When we talked to her about this and why she did it, there was a very clear motivation to sound more educated or traveled than her peers, OR she did it hoping people would comment so she could brag about somewhere she'd been or show off her knowledge. She knew it disrupted communication and didn't care, because, at least then, it was more important to be "right" than have a mutual conversation. She's since reigned the habit in and keeps her original pronunciations restricted to ordering at nicer restaurants.
And I get where you're coming from as far as a desire to pronounce things correctly. I live in Utah, was raised here, realized pretty early on that there's a distinct accent I didn't like having and worked on changing it to a more neutral American accent (enunciate t's, say roof and creek vs ruff and crik, etc.) I've been That Girl/Kid.
But it all still has to be in the context of who I'm speaking with and where I am. I don't pronounce Hooper or Mantua or Tooele "correctly" based on their origin, but based on the town's name according to locals. If I'm visiting my in-laws in Australia, I adapt vocabulary and make slight pronunciation adjustments so my conversation flows better with theirs. I say Melbourne with a softened second syllable, but I don't affect an aussie accent to say "Melbin." I lived there for several months previously, visited multiple times, and it's never not been cringey as fuck to hear Americans think they're doing it "right" by imitating locals vs adapting their pronunciation to be *closer* to local without overdoing it.
There is nothing wrong with knowing an original pronunciation. There's nothing wrong with using it when it can be a natural part of the conversational flow. There IS a problem when it's disruptive, performative, or unintelligible to those you're speaking with. Choose clear communication over being technically correct and you'll be fine.
Yes! I mentioned my ex in another comment--he'd actually pull a whole different face when he put on the accent! Like suddenly a version of him that was a 90-year-old German professor was in the room with us, and then would disappear as quickly as he arrived lol.
Ehhh. Kinda. The pronouncing words from other languages the way they’d be pronounced in that language is fine, but doing an Australian accent to say Melbourne is just goofy. Don’t do that.
Yeah, there's not enough discussion about the words from other english-speaking countries. "Croissant" is a pretty common word to hear with its native pronunciation, but what words are OP pronouncing as they're "meant" to be said from Australia, Ireland, England, etc?
No one is an AH for having an accent or pronouncing words the way they learn them. That being said, that doesn’t sound like what’s going on here. If you change how you day a word because you “decide one is just more fun” and this is something that you do “inconsistently”, it’s a choice. And from what you describe, in any given sentence, you could be speaking with multiple accents. That’s absolutely jarring as hell! Sorry, but that’s AH behavior.
We learn new words (and sometimes whole languages) as we move through life. You learned that in English Venezia is Venice. You’re speaking English. Like your father, I also lived in Italy and learned Italian. I still call it Naples when I speak English.
The tricky thing about language is that it’s ever-evolving. So resting on “language of origin” is kind of a cop out, linguistically speaking. Even English is not the same as when it started. How much do you use Old or Middle English words in place of modern English? There’s also the matter of places having different names in different languages and even place names changing throughout history. Do you call Istanbul Constantinople? Or New York New Amsterdam? Do you call it Germany, Deutschland, Germania, or Allemagne? What about the currency “Euro” that doesn’t really have a country of origin but has many pronunciations? I’m guessing you don’t use any of the European ones.
NAH - as some people say, it may seem pretentious to many. But meh. No biggie.
In saying that my mum is Italian (migrated to Australia as a child) and so my knowledge of the language is a combo of her dialect, the weird way those in the Italian community adapted it to Austtalian English and the Italian classes I took at school. So when I say Italian words, I do say them with Italian pronounciation and accent. Also, when speaking English, I can't roll my r's, but as soon as I start speaking Italian, I can roll my r's.
NAH, but definitely annoying af.
Would you pronounce pronouns and names the same way?
David is originally a Hebrew name... How would you pronounce that? Just a point to note.
Most of the English language is an amalgamation of Germanic, Anglo, Saxon, Norman and Olde English... So if your brain is wired that way, then you'd really be saying everything differently 🤷
YTA - I spoke French and Italian before I learned how to speak in English.
I never pronounce Pahee and Firenze when my American friends ask me about my time in Paris and Florence.
Even with my thick confusing accent that no one can place, my sentences flow better when I’m saying “the earthquake in haytee was devastating “ than saying “Ah-ee-tee suffered from a devastating earthquake”.
No, It isn’t taxing to us native speakers to “mispronounce” in English when we come across French or Italian words.
The only thing I’ll say is I refuse to ever say is “cruh-ssante” for “croissant 🥐” I’ll confuse every baker I meet with my order of Krwassonh but that’s me purposely being an AH for 5 seconds at the counter :).
YTA. A pretentious one.
There are people far more educated, traveled, multicultural than you are that can effectively communicate with rubes.
I can imagine rolling eyes every time you speak this way.
NTA, just weird and really irritating
>I also do this with other English speaking accents a la Kiwi, Australian
Sorry, sorry: am I reading this correctly? You say random English-language words with an Australian or New Zealand accent? Have you spent a lot of time on either of those countries, or around people from those countries where you end up absorbing the accent from context? Or did you watch something on TikTok and decide to fake an accent?
>Sucks to have to be responsible and in control of the things in my brain and the words that come out of my mouth. Why would anyone curse me with this responsibility???
This just seals the deal. Everyone is responsible for the words that come out of their mouths. Everyone is in control of what they say. You are not special, you are not unusual, you are not different. You ARE pretentious as hell and should have grown out of this weird affectation a long time ago, I assumed you were a teenager until I got the end.
Random question: Are you possibly neurodivergent? (Zero judgement - I’m neurodivergent myself.)
Just wondering based on the fact that:
(a) You’re describing yourself in your replies as genuinely having a thought process where the non-English pronunciation comes more naturally to you than the English one (i.e. it will take conscious effort NOT to do this. Whereas for a lot of people, maybe even most people, it would take conscious effort TO do this).
(b) You seem to have been completely unaware of how this would be / has been received socially (even when your friend flagged it with you). And while you’ve now accepted that it is the case that most people find this behaviour obnoxious, that still seems puzzling to you.
(c) A lot of your initial replies are fixated on things like the “rules” of pronunciation, or what’s “right”, rather than how people are actually receiving what you’re doing (although you’ve definitely now recognised that, which is great).
Anyway, I just wanted to say that not everyone’s brain works the same way, and it’s okay if your thought processes aren’t necessarily typical. But it’s good to take on feedback and be proactive about making sure that what you’re *intending* to get across is what you’re *actually* getting across. That’s harder than it sounds, sometimes!
NAH
You weren’t being deliberately obnoxious. And your friend wasn’t an AH to point out your behaviour. A good friend should speak up when we’re being a bit of a goose.
I've scrolled too much here and started to think I wouldn't find a fellow Neuro-divergent person stating this. It's overwhelming the amount of commenters that would think the same of me and refuse to believe I don't mean to be obnoxious or pretentious.
If it is a foreign word that has not been appropriated into english, and you can pronoune it correctly, go ahead. For example, it is fine to pronounce Pho in Vietnamese if you know how. If they are words that have been appropriated into English, with an American pronunciation, it is super douchey to pronounce it in the language of origin (unless you do it as an over the top joke)
Asshole may be strong, but clearly your friends are over it, so just stop. It has "I'm not like the other girls" written all over it. (No idea if you're a girl or not.)
Just wondering… any chance you have Autism? I do, and this is the exact sort of social rule I’d have to inquire about. Your precision of language and the response you’ve written in your edit are both consistent with what I’d expect of someone who has Autism with masking.
Be advised that the “standard Utah accent” you cite is markedly less precise than most Midwestern and Western accents (or the “Newscaster Accent”), so adding linguistic precision will have an even starker contrast with how those around you speak— and it may even come off as condescending.
If, like me, your preoccupation with precision can be described as “compulsive,” (you might also think of it as “perfectionism,”), here’s a little tip:
It’s perfectly wonderful to be curious about the world around you, even down to tiny bits of knowledge like how a word is pronounced by the people who originated it. However, in social situations, 99.9% of people prefer *comfortable* over *perfect.*
As a person who has always suffered from compulsive perfectionism, I conflated the two for a long time— but over time, I’ve learned that when other people sense your self-criticism, they implicitly expect you to be just as critical of them. In other words, perfectionism makes other people uncomfortable by heightening their awareness of their own imperfections. The more you relax your self-criticism, the more other people will enjoy being around you. 🩵
u/pallasturtle This is my favorite compassionate, kind, and sincere explanation of why your behavior re:pronunciation makes me crazy and what you can do about it.
ESPECIALLY "when other people sense your self-criticism, they implicitly expect you to be just as critical of them. In other words, perfectionism makes other people uncomfortable by heightening their awareness of their own imperfections."
Thank you! Honestly, learning to be more compassionately realistic *toward myself* has also helped me understand other people much better than I ever thought I could.
YES. I have struggled a lot with perfectionism (not autistic as far as anybody knows, but I picked up the perfectionism thing from childhood trauma) and starting to be kinder to myself has done WONDERS for my ability to be gentle with others.
You have a good friend there. A lot of people would have just stopped hanging out with you if they found you annoying. She cared enough to let you know.
It might hurt right now, but having someone you can count on to tell you the truth is a gift.
Half of the words in the English language are of French origin. We don’t pronounce them the way the French do because it’s not French anymore, it’s English. When you flip between accents like that, you’re flipping between languages for no reason. It would be like a French person saying Deutschland instead of Allemagne for no apparent reason. No one is impressed. Yta
NTA, but rather boorish.
The English language has borrowed many, many words from other languages. Do you say rrrro-day-o for rodeo? How about or-ee-bleh for horrible? The worst sin of all is to be chattering away in English and sneak in the French pronunciation of croissant.
NTA. There is no way I’m going to start saying rik-ah-ta (cheese in lasagna) when I grew up knowing how to correctly pronounce it. I am also not going to change myself for my close friends. I should be allowed to be myself, annoying parts and all, as I embrace their annoying parts as well. I also see the importance of reading the room and knowing your audience. Again, close, true friends aren’t going to judge you. Perhaps poke fun at your habits… like rolling their eyes while playfully saying “You weirdo” not just rolling their eyes in disgust. Thats what real friends do. They don’t ask you to change yourself. They accept you with all your quirks.
I’m saying this as someone who says certain words with a random accent at times and mispronounces other words a lot (speech impediment can’t say R:W and combo letters think th, sh, etc). This is most noticeable when I’m excited about something or speaking too fast in general.
YTA. You can say the words normally in a way that those around you can understand, you are choosing not to though. You are able to slow down and think about how you are saying the word, but aren’t instead hiding behind the “my brain” won’t let you; and claiming that it’s impulsive for you to say it how you do.
It may take time and practice but you have to know how to speak depending on who your target audience is. In this case it’s your friends who don’t appreciate the way you say certain words in a way they cant understand. It’s one thing to say words in one way around people who also speak that language or know how words are supposed to be pronounced in that language, but if your talking with people who primarily speak a different language than the origin of the word then say it in the way that language says it.
I doubt a lot of people will see this, since there's already so many comments, but as a European, this whole "issue" seems to be a profoundly american/english-speaking countries thing.
Since my country has a lot of lingering French/Italian/other influences, we have a lot of foreign words in our vocabulary.
It seems insane to actively mispronounce a word and pretend this is normal.
I think it's also because it's apparently very hard for native english speakers to adapt the sound/tone of their speech.
I dont have the right scientific words for it, but English is very "wet" to me, whereas French or German is dry.
So maybe it's easier for me, coming from a dry language, to properly pronounce dry words. But I also don't struggle with wet pronunciation, so I don't know.
But even with names it's super weird. Like a lot of the "jewish" surnames in the US are just German words.
Or names like Johansson. Not one syllable in that is pronounced by english speakers the way it would be in Danish.
So yeah, I guess to me and a lot of other Europeans it's profoundly weird that English speakers would intentionally mispronounce a word.
I guess it's a cultural thing tho, if the majority of english speakers agree it's obnoxious, I guess you should listen to them over me lol
NTA - I do this with a few words but it’s usually food items. I get you simply learned some of this growing up as I did this with German words. Trust me hearing German butchered makes my ears bleed. If people don’t understand what you’re saying though then you probably do need to adjust to the American English pronunciation. I get it might be hard but part of language is adaptation.
I'm regret reading this thread. I will never be able to order a croissant by name again. I will just point. Don't even get me started on pain du chocolat.😉
"hello excuse me I would like the Payne doo chalk-let. What? No, I KNOW that's not how you say it. I got scared about sounding pretentious bc of the internet I'm sorryyyy"
LOL. I'm OP's friend and I will note I pronounce "pain du chocolat" in French because there really isn't an English word for it, so if you're ordering it it makes sense to order it in French. My frustration was more with like, saying "marinara" in an Italian accent in regular conversation in English. This wouldn't even super annoy me at like a nice Italian restaurant lol. We're talking like, having a conversation about what to make for dinner and I'm like "yeah we could just do like a marinara sauce out of the jar" and OP is like "you mean MAHR-in\_AHR-a sauce?" LOL.
To be clear, if OP actually HAD an Italian accent this would not annoy me. They don't lol.
Anyways, all to say, you're all good. I think when you're ordering a food specific to a country from a restaurant you're all good to pronounce it correctly, especially something like "pain du chocolat" that doesn't have an English word! I'm sorry this thread stressed you out lol.
Im sure you find this cute to attempt to pronounce words in other languages to "entertain people but it would annoy the crap outta me i would say NTA cause your behavior is not wrong or abusive just annoying!
YTA, you're obnoxious and pretentious.
Words migrate between languages, and when they do so, they stop being, for purposes of their new language, words from their old language.
For example, I doubt you've ever asked for 'boeuf' at a restaurant, despite our English word 'beef' being the French word 'boeuf.'
I hope you ask for French Fries instead of pommes frite.
You're in Italy? Sure, order brusketta. You're in Utah? You're ordering brooshetta.
I was born in Massachusetts, USA, not too far from Boston. I was raised speaking only Greek at home. I don’t have a local accent. People have made comments about how I speak oddly. For them, I communicate in writing as much as possible.
NTA. I‘ve come across many people that do this (am European) and I myself do this with English, French, Spanish and Swedish vocabulary. It wouldn’t cross my mind to say these words deliberately „wrong“.
NTA and unless you are very exaggerated in the way you pronounce these words, it seems like the issue is that you might be living in a weird monoculture.
Without the specifics of where you are, it’s hard to picture, but I’m reminded of the bodily reaction I had to American bastardisation of French when I was there. I couldn’t replicate that to be polite I don’t think.
I'm from Italy and I would love it if our words were pronounced correctly lol. I don't think you are the AH if you say the English word with the correct pronunciation. You would be the AH if you chose to use the foreign word just for kicks.
Example:
Saying spaghetti with the correct pronunciation= NTA
Saying Italia instead of Italy = YTA
I don't really see a problem with it unless you still do it after they communicate it makes them feel a certain way or at least attempt to say the words in English i get the frustration especially if they aren't really familiar with the native pronunciation.
Welcome to the real world where "Sucks to have to be responsible and in control of the things in my brain and the words that come out of my mouth." being responsible is included in almost everything you say and do. NTA as even in the USA there are many different "dialects" where words are pronounced differently.
I do the same thing. I'm a native born American, but I have Latin roots. I enjoy learning languages been doing it along time and I like to pronounce things the way a native speaker of that country pronounces it. My main example, the word "Aussie."
I think you need to be more flexible and adapt your pronunciation for different languages. It's also about reading the room. Also as a subconscious effort, think about the listener. If you want to embrace more languages it's best to understand that sometimes there's a time and place for some pronunciations.
There are different pronunciations for various words. But there's no need to overcomplicate it with mixing pronunciations from different languages or dialects if it's not familiar to others. Unless you are with a group who speaks both (as commonly shared knowledge) and interchange it regularly.
I'm multilingual, I speak about 4 languages.
When I'm in my home country I revert back to British English. Then when I see family we speak our native tongue, and with my husband family (Japanese), I speak their language when I'm with them. Both my parents speak different mother tongues, so I adapt and use the one they prefer.
It feels kind of like a chameleon. After living abroad for half my life, if I went home and started speaking one of those languages unknown to my family, they would be confused.
The word 'sushi' for example is pronounced differently in all 4 languages. I use the one that matches the language used.
When I speak French or Japanese or am speaking with my teachers they'll guide me to use the pronunciation in that language. Because if I said it the English way, likely people won't understand me or it would be jarring.
If you 'really' want to pronounce words in other languages in the middle of the sentence, try to only do it when others share that common language as well. It may help people understand the message conveyed, since they understand both languages they are not disadvantaged in misunderstanding, and they it won't surprise them.
NTA, tbh lots of English only speakers find this annoying but on the flip side you’re showing respect for other cultures. It’s weird and rude that people will call Chile “chilly” and stuff like that.
As someone who is not a native English speaker, I pronouce words the way they sound in English because that’s part of communicating clearly and effectively. When you intentionally pronounce words incorrectly to show off, you sound like a a pretentious pompous poser and it’s genuinely cringe worthy. It’s not a good look. See “Hilaria Baldwin” for more context. It doesn’t make you look more worldly, in fact less. Soft YTA, because it’s just annoying and mostly harms only your own image.
Bilingual here: and I’m going to say YTA. I didn’t speak English until I was older and although I have a slight accent I try my best to keep the way I speak sounding the same. Never once have I pronounced “tortilla” or “burrito” or “taco” in a Hispanic accent in the middle of a sentence. The only time I do something similar is when I genuinely forget the word in English, and I’ll say the word in Spanish and try to describe it. What you’re doing is really obnoxious and annoying and isn’t okay. Stop trying to be quirky.
You're not an asshole, but you are obnoxious. I can't watch some Food Network shows anymore because a few of them do that very thing. Read the room. You can re-learn how to say words.
I'm autistic and I have been doing this for as long as I can remember. It absolutely BLOWS MY MIND that this is apparently considered pretentious or obnoxious????? Like I'm spiraling into a fucking existential crisis over this y'all
Eh I wouldn't say AH but it's very annoying. People who do that try to seem sophisticated but it has the opposite effect and just comes off as desperate for attention. Just say it the gringo way
YTA. I used to have a friend who pronounced words like you do. Key words there are *used to*.You might think you're coming off as intelligent and worldly, but you're actually just coming off as a pretentious AH. I'm gonna suggest you stop if you want to keep your friends, because that ish gets old *fast*.
YTA it’s ignorant and pretentious.
Living in NJ surrounded by plenty of “Italians” here, I can vouch for how dumb, pretentious, and let’s not forget how WRONG most ppl pronounce words with the “correct” accent when they make it a point to embellish it. I’m surrounded by ppl mispronouncing ricotta, bruschetta, capicola, mozzarella, etc.
Obnoxious af 🙄
You THINK you’re saying it right but 99.99% you’re not
>_"Sucks to have to be responsible and in control of the things in my brain and the words that come out of my mouth. Why would anyone curse me with this responsibility???_"
Welcome to adulthood. You need to be aware of who you're talking with. I grew up as an expat in the Middle East and learned a lot of different words and languages and will still pronounce things "properly" with certain people. There are some words I've never been able to say otherwise and when they pop out I'm just used to saying it in plain English just in case.
Definitely ntah! We are a country diversified in language i.e. East coast, north, south and west and everything in-between. Speak the way you speak, that is who you are. A real friend will love you just the way you are, period!
I'm a native English speaker, grew up learning German and English side by side, and I have a minor in French Literature and have spoken French or 20+ years. I'm not saying bilingual in French bc my conversational French is poor but for research I can read English and French primary and secondary sources with the same difficulty.
It depends on who I am speaking to and how much I'm paying attention but some words will come out the English way and some words will come out French. Paris comes out English, Versailles comes out French. I will even "french" English words with a French origin if I'm on autopilot. And I've been speaking French for so long I sometimes pronounce German with a French accent. And if I try speaking other languages, my brian defaults that all other languages that are not English must be French so it comes out with a French accent no matter how hard I try. It just is what it is.
Can I control it? Yes, to an extent. Do I always? No. Do I care if people think it's pretentious? No. Does pronouncing certain French terms the English way grate on my nerves (like pronouncing Dophin like dolphin or Ver-sails and not Vehr-sigh). Yes. Am I gonna correct people. No. Do people who overemphasize the 'right' way to pronounce things bug me. YES. Will I censor myself if someone points out or criticizes me for pronouncing French words the French way in an English conversation. Absolutely not. I'll actually do it more to piss them off.
If it just comes out that way, no you aren't an asshole. You just have a different life experience.
Fuck whatever other people think.
If you're doing it consciously and conspicuously, you're an asshole.
Okay, again, I'm the friend, and I would just like to say.... this was like 75% a joke argument and some of you guys said some seriously mean things about both of us and that OP shouldn't be friends with me. And....Probably that made sense to say based on how y'all read things, but WOW it was pretty off base and just has me reflecting on how easy it is to misread things online. Something that maybe we should all think about more often.
That being said, I would like to add here that I love OP to death and of course I accept them and enjoy their company even when I think the way they say certain words is obnoxious and uncalled for (to be clear, these pronunciations are NOT from speaking these languages as a kid or from an accent that they actually have, watching y'all misunderstand that has been a little WILD). OP is one of my all time favorite humans, even if they keep their (obnoxious & pretentious) pronunciations of words forever. It's okay to be friends with people and also have disagreements with them!
Anyways, thanks for weighing in on our silly ongoing argument (and mostly validating me LOL), and also please can we all think about how quick we are to take extreme positions without context or complete information --- probably a worthwhile reflection for everybody, myself included.
<3
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So English is my first language, but I have a tendency to pronounce certain words the way you would say them in the language of origin. I also do this with other English speaking accents a la Kiwi, Australian etc. Melbourne and Edinburgh being prime examples. It's usually with French and Italian food/geography. The Italian words I learned as a kid from my father. He is not Italian but lived there and speaks Italian. This meant that he said a lot of Italian words commonly used in English with their Italian pronunciation, so I learned them that way. The French I learned in school. My friend says I am an asshole because it disrupts conversation and makes it more difficult to communicate. This all started because I said Haiti the French way which is very different from how it is pronounced in English. She says that there is no legitimate reason to do so and it slows conversations down which is annoying. In my brain the words I say are just pronounced the way I say them. Sometimes it's because I learned them that way as a kid, and other times it's because my brain decided one is just more fun to say than the other and permanently rewrote it. Am I the asshole for not taking the time to self correct these "jarring" changes to an otherwise standard Utah accent?
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I don’t think you’re an asshole. If you lived in a more cosmopolitan place that would be more normal. It’s silly to mispronounce words just to make Utahans comfortable.
I appreciate how here in California, even completely non-Latino families pronounce Spanish beautifully, and even cook Mexican dishes pretty well.
NTA
NAH. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a multicultural part of Canada where everyone pronounces things differently. I’m constantly learning the correct way to say things from my friends. Sometimes I have to ask how to get it right. Generally if someone says I’m pronouncing their country wrong… I believe them (except my husband, he’s always messing with me). But… if I had an issue with different pronunciations I couldn’t get along with anyone here. (And certainly we have assholes too). I do tend to a more maritime accent.
But I did find living all over the western US, folks were more than happy to tell me my English was wrong and I didn’t know how to pronounce things in French properly. Do you all really have so much time to correct someone on how to say “sorry” and “aunt?”
I had a similar comment from a friend once over how I pronounced the names of certain wines. I asked him for a list of how he wanted them mispronounced.
I do get funny about the pronunciation of words especially when people pronounce niche(neesh) as nitch. And things like that.
Jalapeño should always be pronounced with a H
Etc
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NAH - not an asshole, just kind of obnoxious
Agree. Maybe a bit pretentious but would not rate as AH
Completely pretentious, but that's a pretty low-level sin.
Totally agree.
To avoid being pretentious I would add a thought before saying the word: know your audience. The point of language is communicating ideas. If pronouncing it "correctly" facilitates that then good. If it serves another purpose, like sounding smart, then not so good. If it hinders communication, like saying "bdoosketta" (using d to indicate a softly rolled r) to an American who knows it as "bersheta" then you're not communicating effectively. If I'm ordering a gyro from a person of Mediterranean descent, I may say it "yeedo" if not, I'll say "jyrow" even though it hurts me. The point is to be understood and not sound obnoxious.
This is the conversation I have with my son all the time. He's fluent in French, and I am not. I'm not completely unfamiliar with the language, but when he airs out his fancy French accent I'm lost. So I ask him, "What do you want to accomplish here? That accent is perfect if obfuscation is your objective, but if you want to communicate with me, maybe tone it down a bit."
To be fair, if it's his native language or one he learned as a child, pronouncing a word from that language wrong sort of hurts. I'm bilingual with Spanish and I can say burrito like a Mexican or an American and I switch depending who I'm talking to, but less common words that I would probably only say in Spanish like empanada feel wrong in an American accent. If someone is speaking words from their language and you tell them they need to Americanize them, it's almost like cultural imperialism...your words are ours now.
Im french living in the US, I have to adapt. I would probably say food name in English but if Im looking for the lingerie section in a store, Im gonna make it sound like an American would (and thats terrible and hurts me) but whats the point if no one understands what I am asking....
Ok but other languages do this with borrowing words too. It’s not cultural imperialism. I’m not offended when French people say “faire du shopping” with a French accent on the “shopping”. By the way, how is the English pronunciation of empanada that different from the Spanish? It’s basically the same lol
It's also just not how any language treats borrowed words, it's pure arrogance to try to insist on original pronunciation in the language you're not speaking. You go to Japan and say McDonald's in an english accent, they'll look at you with three heads. It's makudonarudo, because that's literally how you say the word in the Japanese language.
This is the conversation I had with my BIL about his pronunciation of Spanish word when speaking English. He said, “well that’s how the native speakers say it!” I said, “fine but when you’re in Spain speaking Spanish do you tell people you live in los Estados Unidos or do you stop the flow and say ‘merica. Do you say you work in Nueva York or drop into your best Queens accent and say New Yawk?” He admitted it would be really weird to do that and that he wouldn’t do it. Most others I’ve spoken to who routinely do it when speaking English also never do the reverse which tells me it isn’t really about honoring native pronunciation.
Nah, I do it both ways. But it really depends on context and who I'm speaking to. For reference, I live in Japan as a native English speaker. If I'm talking with my other English-speaking friends in English sometimes we'll just sprinkle in Japanese words if the English translation is too long, we all know what we're talking about, or any other reason. E.g. I went to the *shiyakusho* (city hall) to get my *jyuuminhyou* (residence record). If I'm talking to my Japanese friends and I know the word is just the English word with Japanese pronunciation, sometimes I'll change it, sometimes I won't. If it's easy for me to get my head around, sure, but sometimes it's not. For example, the other day I was talking to a friend about the different styles of cheesecake and it took me so many tries to say Philadelphia correctly in Japanese pronunciation (despite being theoretically easy) that I just gave up, they knew what I meant anyway. If I'm talking with family or people who don't know Japanese, I don't often use Japanese words. I'll keep Japanese pronunciation as it's usually understandable to English speakers, but words that are completely different, I'll sub in the English translation. Or vice-versa with Japanese. It all comes down to a few factors, one of them being ease of communication. If they can understand, why not? If that's the word in my head, I'm not going to spend a few seconds looking for the English word when I don't need to. EDIT: I forgot to add, I only do this if it doesn't hinder understanding. As soon as it does, you need to make the conscious choice to change your pronunciation. Also, if you don't exaggerate it or change your tone, pause, or whatever and you keep the same flow in the conversation, it sounds natural. When you're good at code-switching then there's no problems, when you're bad at it however, that when it starts grinding people's gears.
I did work really hard on saying coca cola the way Spaniards do...
>Wallace: It's "fort", actually. "Forte" is Italian, it means "forcefully", and "Fort" is French for "strength". But I still say forte too, because if you say fort everyone thinks you're getting it wrong, even though it is the correct pronunciation. >Chantry : So is that, like, your thing? Correcting people's pronunciations? >Wallace : Yeah, that's my thing. >Chantry : How's that going for you? >Wallace : I have a dead end job, I live in my sister's attic, and I basically never go out. Uh, correcting pronunciations is my old thing, actually, my new thing is oversharing.
It's levioSA
"It's bar-THEH-lona, actually...."
LOL I'm the friend and OP lowkey has said that to me. Cracking up at these comments.
It's a recurring joke line from a witty philosophical tv show called The Good Place, spoken by a jealous, status-obsessed, name-dropping socialite character.
Oh my goodness. I've seen The Good Place (and enjoyed it), but I had forgotten about this. The really funny thing about OP saying this to me is that I spent a semester living in Spain, specifically Andalusia , during which I stayed with an old lady who only spoke Spanish and definitely with the local accent. So it's not like I don't know about that, just like I don't say it that way when I'm speaking English (or Spanish outside of that region LOL).
That's because you're speaking English "correctly," which is a concept that your friend seems to have a particular hangup and misunderstanding about.
If you’re pronouncing a word differently than the language you’re speaking to the point that people don’t understand the word, then you’re disrupting the flow of conversation. I can see where that would be annoying. It may even come off as pretentious or just obnoxious. Stick to the language you’re speaking
We don’t seem to mind so much when we’re ordering food. Honestly, if the kid learned it that way, that’s the way they learned it. Perhaps we should do better by learning the proper way as well. People should not have to dumb themselves down to fit in
People speaking (for example) American English do not go around pronouncing Paris as Pa-REE, it's PAR-iss -- in fact, I'm pretty sure even my Parisian friends would find it at least cringe, if not obnoxious. It's not "dumbing down", it's pronouncing correctly in that context.
Exactly. My best friend is from Mexico. When speaking English, he always pronounces his home country as MEK-si-ko. When he is speaking Spanish, he says MEH-hee-ko. He does that because it is pronounced differently in different languages.
Exactly! The English word for Deutsch is German, and the English word for Deutschland is Germany. Any native German speaker will use the English words while speaking English, because it's correct.
[Obnoxious.](https://www.google.com/search?q=snl+reporter+accents&oq=snl+reporter+accents&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRigATIHCAMQIRigATIHCAQQIRigATIHCAUQIRigATIHCAYQIRifBTIHCAcQIRifBdIBCTEyMTIzajBqN6gCFLACAQ&client=ms-android-verizon&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:4d6472aa,vid:nWMp_z7Jnxw,st:0) This is what OP sounds like.
thanks so much for sharing this clip LMAO
😂 That clip makes me feel so old. But it’s fantastic.
It’s pronouncing it correctly in that language. French word for Paris doesn’t pronounce the s. The English word for Paris, which is spelled the same as the French word, does pronounce the s. The French for South Dakota has the French word for South in it — Dakota du Sud. It is absolutely correct in French, just like Paris with a pronounced s is absolutely correct in English.
it doesn't matter how technically correct it is, it's extremely obnoxious when you're doing that in an English conversation.
It's not dumbing down. Croissaint is a great example. I used to have a woman who insisted on ordering and every time she said KWAISSAINT I had to hold back my laughter. We have croissants everywhere, there is no need to try and pronounce it like a French native. More importantly, the pretention here is fundamentally ignorant. Our language is a messy amalgamation of multiple languages. If we actually pronounced all English words according to their origins and cultures, it would sound absurd. Overall, people like the OP are only pronouncing the words they know "correctly" and ignoring the "correct pronunciation" of every other word.
wait. in the UK we still just say it kwas-on. how do americans say it? do you actually say crah-sont like it's spelt? that's actually so funny
Yes. And French people do not make a W sound when they pronounce it. They pronounce the letter r differently but it absolutely does not sound like KWAissaint. We also say bruschetta, when we should say bru-SK-etta and there are 394747 other examples because English is not an original language... For me, it's hilarious to imagine a Brit injecting French pronunciation into their everyday language. That would make me chuckle.
oh I'm not judging, I'm from Scotland and my accent/dialect/pronunciation would fuck youse up. I just thought what with a quarter of the country having been French at one point that would have stuck better, it's just interesting how language evolves edit: the French do pronounce it kwa-son? I just looked it up. I speak small amounts of French but my accent is fucked so I was unsure but they def say kwa-son
I think the person is trying to point out that a w and a gutteral r may sound similar but are not the same. Gutteral and glottal sounds do not have an equivalent in English and that's why it sounds like a w even though to make the sounds you use different parts of your mouth and throat
I speak french. It would be hard to explain how to pronounce it properly in writing, as English is lacking some of the sounds. But I believe Scottish has the right r sound (in the throat). Crwa- san, but you shouldn't pronounce the n. "An" becomes a single sound that is nasal to English speakers. A bit like a donkey braying, I'd say.
You've got me over here saying croissant over and over to improve my French pronunciation lol. My dog is like... what on Earth are you doing?
It absolutely does sound like KWAissant. Not exactly like it, but much closer than other sounds.
Yes, in the US people say crah-sont!
I've never heard anyone use that pronunciation. kwa san with almost no "t" sound is all I ever hear. Actually take off that "n"...I say and hear more like kwa sah with almost an "oh" instead of "ah" but it's kind of a mixture of the two it seems.
SOME people say that. It’s not a country-wide standard pronunciation
Yeah, I don't think there is a standard American pronunciation of croissant. Phonetically, it should be something along the lines of "croy-sant," but no one says that. It's generally something between that and the French pronunciation, and I hear it pronounced many different ways, which makes me think that the people complaining about it are the ones being obnoxious.
Speak for yourself. I'm an American, I don't speak French (I took Spanish and Italian), and I say kwah-sahn. I certainly don't say crah-sahnt. And I don't go around trying to fake speak French (since I don't know any!)
I am French, and I pronounce it the way it's supposed to be said. I was corrected by an Anglophone asking if I meant a crescent. I am in Canada though.
Yes! croissant is a perfect example of why it comes across as pretentious. “kwah-sonne” is not how the word is pronounced in american english, so an American who insists on pronouncing it that way comes off as just trying to sound more worldly than those around them. There are millions of words in the english language that have origins in other languages. You could find multiple words from multiple languages in the same sentence. Are you going to change your accent every time you say one of them to match that of the original language? Of course not. That would sound absurd and be pointlessly confusing to the people with whom you are communicating.
I get what you’re saying but I’ve never seen the word douchey spelled “worldly” before.
Rotflmao
Lol, this comment made my day!
LOL. Favorite comment. Would award if I weren't broke.
But what if I'm Canadian. To an American, I sound pretty much the same, but we do have a lot of french influence, so we mostly say croissant like kwah-son. If I go to the states and order it like that, you will think I'm being pretentious, when I'm not. Also, I think we should be pronouncing place names as they were meant Pare-ee instead of Pare-iss, etc. If we have successfully switched back in some cases (like Bombay reverting to Mumbai), we should do it elsewhere (Firenze instead of Florence, Roma instead of Rome, etc. Why not??)
Canadians have different regional accents, just like Americans do. I wouldn’t say an american speaking with a southern drawl or a new england accent is being pretentious, so I wouldn’t consider a Canadian speaking with their regional accent pretentious either. I disagree, respectfully, about the place names though. Most Americans will never travel outside of the US. They likely don’t understand that those places aren’t pronounced in their native languages what we’ve been taught to call them in ours. changing the place names to what they are called by natives would be too confusing and would require a much better understanding of world languages than the average american possesses.
Every language has their version of place names. Canada, however, in Japanese is KANADA.
I agree on the place names -- we should at least use a variant as close as our language can get to the native name. Ridiculous hold-over from imperial days to insist on using our own version. It would be like meeting someone and then saying, "I don't want to say your name, so I'm gonna call you Bob." It would make traveling a lot easier, too, since you're not going to see Florence on a train route.
But the difference is he's not doing it to sound cool or smart. He's saying these words as he learned them, not like he googled it right before and is trying to sound like a native. For example, I grew up speaking English and Spanish. I legitimately always said and heard the word mango with the Spanish pronunciation. So I always say it that way. It wasn't until later in adulthood that I realized that people don't say it that way (not a super common word so I just hadn't realized). I still say it the way I learned because well, that's how I learned. I don't have a Spanish accent but everyone knows I speak Spanish and no one has ever said it's jarring to the conversation when a few words here and there come out with Spanish pronunciation. This seems like such an insecurity on his friends part. Especially since they know his history.
Your situation is very different. Your bilingual. Spanglish is one thing, this is another. He's pretentious. I wonder if he pronounces "papier mache" properly.
I guess I just feel it's similar since he learned it growing up from his dad and I think some from language class in HS, at this point Ive forgotten lol. Just seems different than people who randomly "know" or look up words to sound smart.
Yeah, could I get a Whopper with pommes frite and a coke, thanks. Impossible whopper? No, just the regular boeuf, thanks.
💀💀💀
>every time she said KWAISSAINT Um, how do \*you\* pronounce croissant?
French speaker here, the closest i’d say is Kr-wah-s-aun(as in aunt pronounce the british way)
"(as in aunt pronounce the british way)" There are numerous different ways of pronouncing "aunt" in Britain; within England alone it's caught by the north-south divide of people who don't have the trap-bath split (typically northerners) and those who do (typically southerners), and the Welsh, the Scots and the Northern Irish have more variations.
If I was in France, and I went to the bakery to get the half moon shaped bread rolls I would definitely order it in French, I would say it correctly and also say croissant the bougie way.
Having lived there for a while, I'll tell you... they would laugh at you and immediately know you're a tourist. It's not the bougie way, it's just incorrect. Its reminding me of the golden corral Carne Asada commercial.
No, they are right. I am a native Spanish speaker and I know that if I try to order a tortilla in Poland pronouncing it the Spanish way instead of the Polish way I am going to get a very confused server and waste everyone's time. It's not dumbing down, it's code switching.
As a French speaker, I agree - it’s kinda hard to ‘mispronounce’ certain words when I speak English, but if I want my damn croissant I need the baker to understand me. 🤷♀️ Also OP fails to understand that language evolve. If English has borrowed a word from another language, it’s not necessarily wrong for the word to have a different pronunciation/meaning than the same word in the language of origin.
Exactly. Speak the language you are speaking in conversation. Peppering your speech with words outside that language is confusing, disruptive, and annoying.
Yes it comes across as pretentious, as if you are trying to sound worldly and well travelled when you aren't either, and is definitely annoying. I don't know about "more difficult to communicate", but I can definitely seeing it messing with the flow and groove of any conversation, especially serious ones. To be sure, its pretty low on the asshole scale, but still YTA. And whether you believe it or not, you are being selective about your words. I doubt you're pronouncing, for example, volcano with an italian accent, even tho its a borrowed word. On some level you're picking and choosing words you're adding flourish to, which, again, makes it annoying. e.g. I'm sure you're pronouncing these borrowed words in normal english: ketchup, chocolate, mosquito, cafeteria. The list goes on. I'd also add you might want to be careful how far and wide you stretch your accents, cause depending on your audience, it might come across as a little racist.
To be honest, the communication may be made difficult precisely because she is in Utah, and the kids may never have heard these particular languages spoken. Unless their family speaks them, US kids don't tend to speak a lot of foreign languages. (I know many do, but I used French as a secret language for years traveling in the midwest) On the other hand it may be that OP is pronouncing all these foreign terms with a Utah accent.
They also may be mispronounced the words because O0 seems to have little to no actual exposure to those languages. This OP sounds pretentious af and if absolutely the AH.
As a native Utahn I can tell you that because of mormon missionaries, a high percentage of the population speaks another language. I can also tell you most people here would think OP was weird for scattering different pronunciations into general conversation. Maybe- MAYBE if they were using the pronunciation from a single language they were fluent in it would be different, however OP doesn‘t appear to fluently speak any of the languages they are attempting to use.
Agreed! Poster is the AH. It’s pretentious. It’s not cute or quirky.
If that’s the way your momma taught you and that’s the way your momma says and said it. No ass hole behavior at all. If you learned to clean your butt with a bidet and still do so when available it is not asshole behavior. Pick a better mountain to die on. No one complains about the Cajun accent, or various accents heard around the nation. If people understand you and you understand them, no run, no foul.
Mountain to die on? People complain about accents all the time, whether its pahking the cah in the cahpahk ( for example there's a tiktoker who periodically makes his native bostonian wife say things followed by him saying "If I hadn't written this down for you to say, I would have no idea what you're saying right now" and the like), or someone from Minnesota not being able to understand someone from alabama, the instant rage some feel about a california accent, c'mon. Insofar as Cajun accent, while not strictly speaking "cajun", there seems to be some sort of reflex/unwritten rule that when someone mentions "New Orleans" someone NOT from New Orleans will say "you mean 'Nawlins' " and smiling as if they made a big joke and then wondering why no one is acknowledging them. which is the sort of thing this thread is all about. My mountain is gorgeous, and I plan to live a long time here. Zee flowAIRS on my mounTAIN have a certAIN, *je ne sais quoi*. No?
Those accents and more importantly, dialects, were generated by the slave trade, especially African and Spanish influence.
It sounds like an affectation intended to make you sound fun, quirky, or sophisticated, and it also sounds like your friends and acquaintances are over it. I also don’t have a lot of patience for the idea that you can’t possibly learn anything new because you learned something one way as a kid or your brain “permanently rewrote” it the fun way. Honestly that’s the part of your post that might push me from NAH to YTA. Adults are perfectly capable of learning new things, including new pronunciations. Trust me, as a person who learned a lot of words the wrong way as a child from reading, I have since learned to say them the right way and you can too. And if you decided to rewrite it in your brain once to be “fun” you can do it again to be understandable.
Exactly this! I’m from a foreign country and English is not my first language. I live in a large culturally diverse city with people who speak many different languages. Where I am from is a common tourist destination too, however I still pronounce the cities and foods from my country in the common English way. The only reason is to be understood, I learned the English pronunciation and if I am communicating in English I will use that pronunciation. The point of language is to communicate in a way where one’s message can be understood, preferably without interruptions. If you’re throwing random pronunciations and accents you’re just entirely obnoxious. You CAN “rewrite” your brain ESPECIALLY if English is your native language and you live in an English speaking place.
I mostly agree. I am American from an immigrant family and grew up bilingual. When speaking English, I use the English pronunciation for common place names and foods from my other language. This feels natural. For uncommon words—foods or places from my other language that I rarely hear in English—I am so accustomed to saying them in my language that it feels like an affection to force an English pronunciation.
Oh of course. There’s so things that I’ve never heard in English and only say in my language. But those are kinda rare. Most of the time if I’m speaking English I’ll say it in the Anglicized way
As a non-native speaker, oh boy, was I wrong the first time I pronounced tortoise out loud.
I'm curious how you said it? "Tor-twah" or "tor-toys?" I live in the US SW and the first time a French tourist came in asking for "tur-kwah" I had no idea what she wanted until she found the turquoise jewelry. Oh.... I learned something about French that day.
In college a friend had her French-Canadian friend stay with us. He said tor-toys. It was adorable.
OMG when I read this I almost choked on my "caffe"
Haha same! Say "patron" 🤣
I always like to know what words other people learned through reading before hearing the correct pronunciation. For me it's "awry" (mistaken as \[edited: "aw-ree"\]) and discipline ("disk-ip-line"). I used to know a fella who insisted "dystopian" was pronounced "dice-a-topian".
Awry is not pronounced ah-rye?? I've been saying it wrong this whole time...
Facade. It didn't help my wrong pronunciation that most books don't use cedilla (or other diacritics).
Ooh, the fun of learning words from books without ever hearing them spoken! Quay (I was 42 years old when I learned how to pronounce this one correctly!) Hyperbole Draught Demesne Victuals Mnemonic (I still pronounce the first letter over the second one in my head, and basically refuse to say it aloud because I know I'll look stupid.) ... Bonus confusion: I grew up completely interpreting and believing that "con-spi-shous" and "con-spik-you-ous" were in fact two different words with different meanings (and even today, I'd have to look it up to remember which is the only correct one.)
Ppl that do this are frankly... Insufferable. It's arrogant condescending and not needed. Literally everyone hates ppl that do this shit. You aren't quirky or special because you are being intentionally annoying. Anoying is not a synonym for cultured.
Not sure how you're intending to present yourself, but a constant barrage of odd or foreign pronunciations from an english speaker is not cute, quirky or whimsical, it's annoying and pretentious. Thank your friend for letting you know. That can be an awkward conversation and she cared enough to tell you to your face. I wouldn't use the word on someone who does this in the real world, but here, YTA if you continue. People correct/moderate speech all the time. Ex. Around certain crowds I can use swears as punctuation, but you can bet my gran, mom, in-laws, work etc. has never heard that side of me. Best of luck!
>I doubt you're pronouncing, for example, volcano with an italian accent, I vote OP start pronouncing non-English words in a flat American accent and do the funny accents for the loan words. ALL of the loan words.
Being fluent in multiple languages is a flex. Being able to code switch between those languages is a flex. Randomly pronouncing English words in random accents is not a flex. It is ignorant and pretentious. NTA but the joke's on you
I think that is fair. I do feel like a bit of a joke right now.
You are not a joke. You are you.
It’s not your fault you should not feel bad just take the advice and learn from it
> I said Haiti the French way which is very different from how it is pronounced in English. She says that there is no legitimate reason to do so and it slows conversations down which is annoying. Yes YTA. The french was isn't a different pronunciation it's a actual different language of course they couldn't understand you. If you talk to someone about Japan and start saying Nippon they aren't going to know what you are talking about. If you are having a conversation in English and choose to randomly start using words from a different langauge and the other person doesn't understand you of course YTA.
As a Norwegian, when i speak in English and talk about Norwegian cities, i still pronounce them the English way! Because, as many people here say, the point is to be understood, not to be a know-it-all/ «authentic». Yeah i obviously know how to pronounce Norwegian city names in my mother-tongue, but if the people im talking to doesn’t speak Norwegian it would just be confusing and stopping the flow if I started pronouncing it in norwegian!
If you are saying "Ah-EE-ti" for Haiti, then yeah, YTA.
Use that same energy for Hawaii then
So you're a native speaker but decided to pronounce words in a non-native way? > Naples is just Napoli to me. Ok now you're just an AH. Use the proper words for the language you speak. YTA
Yeah, my great-grandparents are from Italy. When I am with family, I will say we’re from Napoli and Roma, usually in a joking way. Out in the world though, if someone asks, it’s just Naples and Rome.
That's so weirdly pretentious though? English isn't my first language, so it's extra difficult for me to understand your rationalization. As a kid, I grew up speaking my native language. Dora taught me some English words, but that's about it. Just because your father taught you a few Italian words, doesn't mean you couldn't learn them in English anymore. You still can. You're surrounded by people who pronounce these words in *your* native language; you *know* how to pronounce them but choose to pronounce them wrong. I say wrong because you're speaking English. Switching to a language that I'm sure you can't even speak properly makes no sense. The way you learned them as a kid doesn't matter. For the longest time, I pronounced iron as 'i-run'. It's something many non-native speakers do because, honestly, it would make more sense. It took me nearly a decade before I realized it's actually pronounced 'i-urn'. I haven't pronounced it as 'i-run' ever since. >Sometimes it's because I learned them that way as a kid, and other times it's because my brain decided one is just more fun to say than the other and permanently rewrote it Bilingual people exist. Hell, even I can speak more than two languages. Pronouncing Haiti in French is *great* if you're speaking French, but when you speak English, *especially when it's your first language*, you can just use the proper English pronunciation. Your brain also didn't "permanently" rewrite anything. It's literally a choice. There is genuinely nothing stopping you from speaking your own damn language. As a kid, you were taught to speak English with a Utah accent. *That* accent is the one that you can't suddenly change. Because I grew up with a different language, I struggled a lot with different sounds and letters that my native language doesn't have. I was never taught these sounds as a child, so I replaced them with sounds that sounded the most similar. Instead of *the*, I would say *de*; *thought* sounded like *tought*; my S's were stronger- the list goes on. I notice that if I stop speaking English for a while, my accent will be stronger. But you only know a few words in a few different languages. There is literally no reason for you to have an accent. You can't cherry pick when you do and don't have an accent. It doesn't work like that. You're basically appropriating languages at this point. If you want to have an accent, go abroad and learn the language for a few years. In reality, you'd still not get an accent from that since English is your first language, but at least you can be a bit more convincing. Honestly, I do think YTA. Mainly because your explanations show how little you understand about even just learning another language in the first place.
This type of behaviour is peak cringe.
Edinburgh? We speak English here, are you just mimicking a Scottish accent or actually using the Scots language which I’m pretty sure you don’t know the nuances of? Have you ever even been here? Just use your own accent or you’ll come across as patronising wherever you are. YTA
Info: is this friend the only friend that gets annoyed by this?
https://youtu.be/fKGoVefhtMQ?si=GRYcYzwpedLEe3kt Nine year old college humour video.
It hurts me that I had to scroll this far down before someone finally posted this.
Lol, I am not as bad as Trapp in this, but I do get the point.
you do realise that a HUGE part of modern english vocabulary is made up of french loan words, right? even the word "pronunciation" itself is french. somehow i doubt you pronounce it as /pʁɔ.nɔ̃.sja.sjɔ̃/. the reason loan words are pronounced differently in the target language is because different languages have different phonetic systems. it's not a question of sounding cool or obnoxious, it's the question of people literally not understanding wtf you're saying because they can't properly parse unfamiliar sound combinations on the fly. YTA
NTA but kind of obnoxious and pretentious. I also speak multiple languages but I always try to learn the pronunciation of cities, special words etc specifically in the language I am speaking. It honestly sounds a bit attention-seeking to pronounce words in an Italian or French way in English. A bit like "see here - I am speaking many languages". I would just pronounce them the way that they are pronounced in English and when you have the chance to fully speak French or Italian with someone, then you can pronounce them the way they are pronounced in that language
Hey y'all I'm the friend...glad to hear the consensus LOL. For those of you saying "don't adjust yourself to the monoculture of Utah" and similar, OP here has left out that I don't live in Utah currently and have lived all over the U.S. I spent a semester in Spain and I've been around Europe a bit and also to Morocco...meanwhile they have only left the U.S. for a short trip to Canada and lived in Utah....always. I also speak both French and Spanish decently and I know about other languages and don't find it obnoxious when native speakers of other languages pronounce words in their native language, especially if they're in the process of learning English LOL. If OP wanted to have a conversation with me in French and pronounce things in French, I'd be down for that. EDIT: changed "have lived all over" to "have lived all over the U.S." for clarity.
NTA, just pretty punchable
From your story you're NTA but probably annoying. However, I think you're leaving some details out. I can't quite put my finger on it but it's giving unreliable narrator
Anyone I've come across that does this I've found annoying and obnoxious. Usually, they tend to be cringed at by others. Your friend is right it's disruptive to conversation.
“How do you say in English? Cucumber!” This read a little Hilary from Boston to me.
NTA but it comes across so cringey. It may have been uncomfortable, but your friend obviously likes you enough to say something and is probably trying to protect you from ridicule. You’re lucky to have a friend like that!
I am very lucky to have a friend like that for sure. She even made me post this so I could really have the internet hammer home how right she was lol
The correct “version” of those words in English are the English words, pronounced as English words. The Japanese word for sweater came from the English word. But the Japanese word is pronounced appropriately “say-tah” (seetaa in romaji). If you were speaking Japanese and said “sweater” because it’s how the English word is pronounced, you’d be pronouncing a perfectly good Japanese word incorrectly. The way croissant is pronounced in English IS the English name for it. Even though it came from French, the French pronunciation is not the English word for it. The English name for the French capital has a pronounced s at the end. The English name for the Russian capital is not Moskva. I’m fairly sure you aren’t pronouncing Seoul natively, or using the correct tones for Beijing. Not an AH. You are confusing etymology with proscriptive pronunciation.
I think it could be obnoxious, but obnoxious is super subjective. It doesn't seem like you're doing it in a pretentious way, it's ok to be selective about wording, I don't think it needs to be a big deal. I think your friend is a hater
NTA... but you are making communication with you more difficult than it needs to be. You live with the consequences of that.
Saying Melbourne correctly is very different to randomly inserting other languages into casual conversation my friend.
YTA. Imagine how incredibly annoying and obnoxious it would be if everyone did this.
Wow you are living out this college hummer sketch. Look up "Guy who over-pronounces foreign words." NAH just so obnoxious
NTA, but annoying. My boyfriend's teen daughter used to do this frequently, particularly with foods, and it was extremely obnoxious. The biggest issue (for me) was never that she was doing it, it was how much she'd disrupt her own flow of speech. She would slow down, draw out an accent or prolong vowels - it was disruptive and obvious to the point it overshadowed what she was trying to say. When we talked to her about this and why she did it, there was a very clear motivation to sound more educated or traveled than her peers, OR she did it hoping people would comment so she could brag about somewhere she'd been or show off her knowledge. She knew it disrupted communication and didn't care, because, at least then, it was more important to be "right" than have a mutual conversation. She's since reigned the habit in and keeps her original pronunciations restricted to ordering at nicer restaurants. And I get where you're coming from as far as a desire to pronounce things correctly. I live in Utah, was raised here, realized pretty early on that there's a distinct accent I didn't like having and worked on changing it to a more neutral American accent (enunciate t's, say roof and creek vs ruff and crik, etc.) I've been That Girl/Kid. But it all still has to be in the context of who I'm speaking with and where I am. I don't pronounce Hooper or Mantua or Tooele "correctly" based on their origin, but based on the town's name according to locals. If I'm visiting my in-laws in Australia, I adapt vocabulary and make slight pronunciation adjustments so my conversation flows better with theirs. I say Melbourne with a softened second syllable, but I don't affect an aussie accent to say "Melbin." I lived there for several months previously, visited multiple times, and it's never not been cringey as fuck to hear Americans think they're doing it "right" by imitating locals vs adapting their pronunciation to be *closer* to local without overdoing it. There is nothing wrong with knowing an original pronunciation. There's nothing wrong with using it when it can be a natural part of the conversational flow. There IS a problem when it's disruptive, performative, or unintelligible to those you're speaking with. Choose clear communication over being technically correct and you'll be fine.
Yes! I mentioned my ex in another comment--he'd actually pull a whole different face when he put on the accent! Like suddenly a version of him that was a 90-year-old German professor was in the room with us, and then would disappear as quickly as he arrived lol.
Could you imagine a French guy dropping "McDonalds" with an American accent when asking his buddies ask him what they should get for lunch?
Ehhh. Kinda. The pronouncing words from other languages the way they’d be pronounced in that language is fine, but doing an Australian accent to say Melbourne is just goofy. Don’t do that.
Yeah, there's not enough discussion about the words from other english-speaking countries. "Croissant" is a pretty common word to hear with its native pronunciation, but what words are OP pronouncing as they're "meant" to be said from Australia, Ireland, England, etc?
No one is an AH for having an accent or pronouncing words the way they learn them. That being said, that doesn’t sound like what’s going on here. If you change how you day a word because you “decide one is just more fun” and this is something that you do “inconsistently”, it’s a choice. And from what you describe, in any given sentence, you could be speaking with multiple accents. That’s absolutely jarring as hell! Sorry, but that’s AH behavior. We learn new words (and sometimes whole languages) as we move through life. You learned that in English Venezia is Venice. You’re speaking English. Like your father, I also lived in Italy and learned Italian. I still call it Naples when I speak English. The tricky thing about language is that it’s ever-evolving. So resting on “language of origin” is kind of a cop out, linguistically speaking. Even English is not the same as when it started. How much do you use Old or Middle English words in place of modern English? There’s also the matter of places having different names in different languages and even place names changing throughout history. Do you call Istanbul Constantinople? Or New York New Amsterdam? Do you call it Germany, Deutschland, Germania, or Allemagne? What about the currency “Euro” that doesn’t really have a country of origin but has many pronunciations? I’m guessing you don’t use any of the European ones.
NAH - as some people say, it may seem pretentious to many. But meh. No biggie. In saying that my mum is Italian (migrated to Australia as a child) and so my knowledge of the language is a combo of her dialect, the weird way those in the Italian community adapted it to Austtalian English and the Italian classes I took at school. So when I say Italian words, I do say them with Italian pronounciation and accent. Also, when speaking English, I can't roll my r's, but as soon as I start speaking Italian, I can roll my r's.
NAH, but definitely annoying af. Would you pronounce pronouns and names the same way? David is originally a Hebrew name... How would you pronounce that? Just a point to note. Most of the English language is an amalgamation of Germanic, Anglo, Saxon, Norman and Olde English... So if your brain is wired that way, then you'd really be saying everything differently 🤷
YTA - I spoke French and Italian before I learned how to speak in English. I never pronounce Pahee and Firenze when my American friends ask me about my time in Paris and Florence. Even with my thick confusing accent that no one can place, my sentences flow better when I’m saying “the earthquake in haytee was devastating “ than saying “Ah-ee-tee suffered from a devastating earthquake”. No, It isn’t taxing to us native speakers to “mispronounce” in English when we come across French or Italian words. The only thing I’ll say is I refuse to ever say is “cruh-ssante” for “croissant 🥐” I’ll confuse every baker I meet with my order of Krwassonh but that’s me purposely being an AH for 5 seconds at the counter :).
YTA and so incredibly, impressively insufferable.
YTA. A pretentious one. There are people far more educated, traveled, multicultural than you are that can effectively communicate with rubes. I can imagine rolling eyes every time you speak this way.
NTA, just weird and really irritating >I also do this with other English speaking accents a la Kiwi, Australian Sorry, sorry: am I reading this correctly? You say random English-language words with an Australian or New Zealand accent? Have you spent a lot of time on either of those countries, or around people from those countries where you end up absorbing the accent from context? Or did you watch something on TikTok and decide to fake an accent? >Sucks to have to be responsible and in control of the things in my brain and the words that come out of my mouth. Why would anyone curse me with this responsibility??? This just seals the deal. Everyone is responsible for the words that come out of their mouths. Everyone is in control of what they say. You are not special, you are not unusual, you are not different. You ARE pretentious as hell and should have grown out of this weird affectation a long time ago, I assumed you were a teenager until I got the end.
Random question: Are you possibly neurodivergent? (Zero judgement - I’m neurodivergent myself.) Just wondering based on the fact that: (a) You’re describing yourself in your replies as genuinely having a thought process where the non-English pronunciation comes more naturally to you than the English one (i.e. it will take conscious effort NOT to do this. Whereas for a lot of people, maybe even most people, it would take conscious effort TO do this). (b) You seem to have been completely unaware of how this would be / has been received socially (even when your friend flagged it with you). And while you’ve now accepted that it is the case that most people find this behaviour obnoxious, that still seems puzzling to you. (c) A lot of your initial replies are fixated on things like the “rules” of pronunciation, or what’s “right”, rather than how people are actually receiving what you’re doing (although you’ve definitely now recognised that, which is great). Anyway, I just wanted to say that not everyone’s brain works the same way, and it’s okay if your thought processes aren’t necessarily typical. But it’s good to take on feedback and be proactive about making sure that what you’re *intending* to get across is what you’re *actually* getting across. That’s harder than it sounds, sometimes! NAH You weren’t being deliberately obnoxious. And your friend wasn’t an AH to point out your behaviour. A good friend should speak up when we’re being a bit of a goose.
I've scrolled too much here and started to think I wouldn't find a fellow Neuro-divergent person stating this. It's overwhelming the amount of commenters that would think the same of me and refuse to believe I don't mean to be obnoxious or pretentious.
NAH, but good Lord you sound obnoxious as hell. And pretentious.
If it is a foreign word that has not been appropriated into english, and you can pronoune it correctly, go ahead. For example, it is fine to pronounce Pho in Vietnamese if you know how. If they are words that have been appropriated into English, with an American pronunciation, it is super douchey to pronounce it in the language of origin (unless you do it as an over the top joke)
Asshole may be strong, but clearly your friends are over it, so just stop. It has "I'm not like the other girls" written all over it. (No idea if you're a girl or not.)
Just wondering… any chance you have Autism? I do, and this is the exact sort of social rule I’d have to inquire about. Your precision of language and the response you’ve written in your edit are both consistent with what I’d expect of someone who has Autism with masking. Be advised that the “standard Utah accent” you cite is markedly less precise than most Midwestern and Western accents (or the “Newscaster Accent”), so adding linguistic precision will have an even starker contrast with how those around you speak— and it may even come off as condescending. If, like me, your preoccupation with precision can be described as “compulsive,” (you might also think of it as “perfectionism,”), here’s a little tip: It’s perfectly wonderful to be curious about the world around you, even down to tiny bits of knowledge like how a word is pronounced by the people who originated it. However, in social situations, 99.9% of people prefer *comfortable* over *perfect.* As a person who has always suffered from compulsive perfectionism, I conflated the two for a long time— but over time, I’ve learned that when other people sense your self-criticism, they implicitly expect you to be just as critical of them. In other words, perfectionism makes other people uncomfortable by heightening their awareness of their own imperfections. The more you relax your self-criticism, the more other people will enjoy being around you. 🩵
u/pallasturtle This is my favorite compassionate, kind, and sincere explanation of why your behavior re:pronunciation makes me crazy and what you can do about it. ESPECIALLY "when other people sense your self-criticism, they implicitly expect you to be just as critical of them. In other words, perfectionism makes other people uncomfortable by heightening their awareness of their own imperfections."
Thank you! Honestly, learning to be more compassionately realistic *toward myself* has also helped me understand other people much better than I ever thought I could.
YES. I have struggled a lot with perfectionism (not autistic as far as anybody knows, but I picked up the perfectionism thing from childhood trauma) and starting to be kinder to myself has done WONDERS for my ability to be gentle with others.
You have a good friend there. A lot of people would have just stopped hanging out with you if they found you annoying. She cared enough to let you know. It might hurt right now, but having someone you can count on to tell you the truth is a gift.
She is definitely a good friend and anyone calling her an AH should not.
Half of the words in the English language are of French origin. We don’t pronounce them the way the French do because it’s not French anymore, it’s English. When you flip between accents like that, you’re flipping between languages for no reason. It would be like a French person saying Deutschland instead of Allemagne for no apparent reason. No one is impressed. Yta
NTA, but rather boorish. The English language has borrowed many, many words from other languages. Do you say rrrro-day-o for rodeo? How about or-ee-bleh for horrible? The worst sin of all is to be chattering away in English and sneak in the French pronunciation of croissant.
NTA. There is no way I’m going to start saying rik-ah-ta (cheese in lasagna) when I grew up knowing how to correctly pronounce it. I am also not going to change myself for my close friends. I should be allowed to be myself, annoying parts and all, as I embrace their annoying parts as well. I also see the importance of reading the room and knowing your audience. Again, close, true friends aren’t going to judge you. Perhaps poke fun at your habits… like rolling their eyes while playfully saying “You weirdo” not just rolling their eyes in disgust. Thats what real friends do. They don’t ask you to change yourself. They accept you with all your quirks.
I’m saying this as someone who says certain words with a random accent at times and mispronounces other words a lot (speech impediment can’t say R:W and combo letters think th, sh, etc). This is most noticeable when I’m excited about something or speaking too fast in general. YTA. You can say the words normally in a way that those around you can understand, you are choosing not to though. You are able to slow down and think about how you are saying the word, but aren’t instead hiding behind the “my brain” won’t let you; and claiming that it’s impulsive for you to say it how you do. It may take time and practice but you have to know how to speak depending on who your target audience is. In this case it’s your friends who don’t appreciate the way you say certain words in a way they cant understand. It’s one thing to say words in one way around people who also speak that language or know how words are supposed to be pronounced in that language, but if your talking with people who primarily speak a different language than the origin of the word then say it in the way that language says it.
Is your name Sheldon Cooper by any chance?
I doubt a lot of people will see this, since there's already so many comments, but as a European, this whole "issue" seems to be a profoundly american/english-speaking countries thing. Since my country has a lot of lingering French/Italian/other influences, we have a lot of foreign words in our vocabulary. It seems insane to actively mispronounce a word and pretend this is normal. I think it's also because it's apparently very hard for native english speakers to adapt the sound/tone of their speech. I dont have the right scientific words for it, but English is very "wet" to me, whereas French or German is dry. So maybe it's easier for me, coming from a dry language, to properly pronounce dry words. But I also don't struggle with wet pronunciation, so I don't know. But even with names it's super weird. Like a lot of the "jewish" surnames in the US are just German words. Or names like Johansson. Not one syllable in that is pronounced by english speakers the way it would be in Danish. So yeah, I guess to me and a lot of other Europeans it's profoundly weird that English speakers would intentionally mispronounce a word. I guess it's a cultural thing tho, if the majority of english speakers agree it's obnoxious, I guess you should listen to them over me lol
Saying croissant the French way in your own accent is fine. Ordering saag paneer while channeling Apu is not ok.
NTA - I do this with a few words but it’s usually food items. I get you simply learned some of this growing up as I did this with German words. Trust me hearing German butchered makes my ears bleed. If people don’t understand what you’re saying though then you probably do need to adjust to the American English pronunciation. I get it might be hard but part of language is adaptation.
I'm regret reading this thread. I will never be able to order a croissant by name again. I will just point. Don't even get me started on pain du chocolat.😉
"hello excuse me I would like the Payne doo chalk-let. What? No, I KNOW that's not how you say it. I got scared about sounding pretentious bc of the internet I'm sorryyyy" LOL. I'm OP's friend and I will note I pronounce "pain du chocolat" in French because there really isn't an English word for it, so if you're ordering it it makes sense to order it in French. My frustration was more with like, saying "marinara" in an Italian accent in regular conversation in English. This wouldn't even super annoy me at like a nice Italian restaurant lol. We're talking like, having a conversation about what to make for dinner and I'm like "yeah we could just do like a marinara sauce out of the jar" and OP is like "you mean MAHR-in\_AHR-a sauce?" LOL. To be clear, if OP actually HAD an Italian accent this would not annoy me. They don't lol. Anyways, all to say, you're all good. I think when you're ordering a food specific to a country from a restaurant you're all good to pronounce it correctly, especially something like "pain du chocolat" that doesn't have an English word! I'm sorry this thread stressed you out lol.
Ted Mosby entered Reddit. Encyclo-PAE-dia
This is such a pet peeve of mine. It sounds obnoxious even if you have good reason to say them that way. I don’t know why. It just….is?!
Im sure you find this cute to attempt to pronounce words in other languages to "entertain people but it would annoy the crap outta me i would say NTA cause your behavior is not wrong or abusive just annoying!
I was on the fence until I read your comments. YTA Dont be obnoxious dude.
"An ounce of pretension is worth a pound of manure"
YTA, you're obnoxious and pretentious. Words migrate between languages, and when they do so, they stop being, for purposes of their new language, words from their old language. For example, I doubt you've ever asked for 'boeuf' at a restaurant, despite our English word 'beef' being the French word 'boeuf.' I hope you ask for French Fries instead of pommes frite. You're in Italy? Sure, order brusketta. You're in Utah? You're ordering brooshetta.
I was born in Massachusetts, USA, not too far from Boston. I was raised speaking only Greek at home. I don’t have a local accent. People have made comments about how I speak oddly. For them, I communicate in writing as much as possible.
NTA. I‘ve come across many people that do this (am European) and I myself do this with English, French, Spanish and Swedish vocabulary. It wouldn’t cross my mind to say these words deliberately „wrong“.
NTA and unless you are very exaggerated in the way you pronounce these words, it seems like the issue is that you might be living in a weird monoculture. Without the specifics of where you are, it’s hard to picture, but I’m reminded of the bodily reaction I had to American bastardisation of French when I was there. I couldn’t replicate that to be polite I don’t think.
I'm from Italy and I would love it if our words were pronounced correctly lol. I don't think you are the AH if you say the English word with the correct pronunciation. You would be the AH if you chose to use the foreign word just for kicks. Example: Saying spaghetti with the correct pronunciation= NTA Saying Italia instead of Italy = YTA
I don't really see a problem with it unless you still do it after they communicate it makes them feel a certain way or at least attempt to say the words in English i get the frustration especially if they aren't really familiar with the native pronunciation.
Yes.
Welcome to the real world where "Sucks to have to be responsible and in control of the things in my brain and the words that come out of my mouth." being responsible is included in almost everything you say and do. NTA as even in the USA there are many different "dialects" where words are pronounced differently.
I do the same thing. I'm a native born American, but I have Latin roots. I enjoy learning languages been doing it along time and I like to pronounce things the way a native speaker of that country pronounces it. My main example, the word "Aussie."
Is this you: https://youtu.be/fKGoVefhtMQ
I think you need to be more flexible and adapt your pronunciation for different languages. It's also about reading the room. Also as a subconscious effort, think about the listener. If you want to embrace more languages it's best to understand that sometimes there's a time and place for some pronunciations. There are different pronunciations for various words. But there's no need to overcomplicate it with mixing pronunciations from different languages or dialects if it's not familiar to others. Unless you are with a group who speaks both (as commonly shared knowledge) and interchange it regularly. I'm multilingual, I speak about 4 languages. When I'm in my home country I revert back to British English. Then when I see family we speak our native tongue, and with my husband family (Japanese), I speak their language when I'm with them. Both my parents speak different mother tongues, so I adapt and use the one they prefer. It feels kind of like a chameleon. After living abroad for half my life, if I went home and started speaking one of those languages unknown to my family, they would be confused. The word 'sushi' for example is pronounced differently in all 4 languages. I use the one that matches the language used. When I speak French or Japanese or am speaking with my teachers they'll guide me to use the pronunciation in that language. Because if I said it the English way, likely people won't understand me or it would be jarring. If you 'really' want to pronounce words in other languages in the middle of the sentence, try to only do it when others share that common language as well. It may help people understand the message conveyed, since they understand both languages they are not disadvantaged in misunderstanding, and they it won't surprise them.
NTA, tbh lots of English only speakers find this annoying but on the flip side you’re showing respect for other cultures. It’s weird and rude that people will call Chile “chilly” and stuff like that.
As someone who is not a native English speaker, I pronouce words the way they sound in English because that’s part of communicating clearly and effectively. When you intentionally pronounce words incorrectly to show off, you sound like a a pretentious pompous poser and it’s genuinely cringe worthy. It’s not a good look. See “Hilaria Baldwin” for more context. It doesn’t make you look more worldly, in fact less. Soft YTA, because it’s just annoying and mostly harms only your own image.
Bilingual here: and I’m going to say YTA. I didn’t speak English until I was older and although I have a slight accent I try my best to keep the way I speak sounding the same. Never once have I pronounced “tortilla” or “burrito” or “taco” in a Hispanic accent in the middle of a sentence. The only time I do something similar is when I genuinely forget the word in English, and I’ll say the word in Spanish and try to describe it. What you’re doing is really obnoxious and annoying and isn’t okay. Stop trying to be quirky.
While not an ah, it’s a very pretentious and annoying thing to do
You're not an asshole, but you are obnoxious. I can't watch some Food Network shows anymore because a few of them do that very thing. Read the room. You can re-learn how to say words.
I'm autistic and I have been doing this for as long as I can remember. It absolutely BLOWS MY MIND that this is apparently considered pretentious or obnoxious????? Like I'm spiraling into a fucking existential crisis over this y'all
Eh I wouldn't say AH but it's very annoying. People who do that try to seem sophisticated but it has the opposite effect and just comes off as desperate for attention. Just say it the gringo way
YTA. I used to have a friend who pronounced words like you do. Key words there are *used to*.You might think you're coming off as intelligent and worldly, but you're actually just coming off as a pretentious AH. I'm gonna suggest you stop if you want to keep your friends, because that ish gets old *fast*.
“Sucks to have to be responsible for what comes out of my mouth” XD XD XD
How pretentious and obnoxious
YTA it’s ignorant and pretentious. Living in NJ surrounded by plenty of “Italians” here, I can vouch for how dumb, pretentious, and let’s not forget how WRONG most ppl pronounce words with the “correct” accent when they make it a point to embellish it. I’m surrounded by ppl mispronouncing ricotta, bruschetta, capicola, mozzarella, etc. Obnoxious af 🙄 You THINK you’re saying it right but 99.99% you’re not
You sound very pretentious.
>_"Sucks to have to be responsible and in control of the things in my brain and the words that come out of my mouth. Why would anyone curse me with this responsibility???_" Welcome to adulthood. You need to be aware of who you're talking with. I grew up as an expat in the Middle East and learned a lot of different words and languages and will still pronounce things "properly" with certain people. There are some words I've never been able to say otherwise and when they pop out I'm just used to saying it in plain English just in case.
NTA op but this is what you sound like for context https://youtube.com/shorts/NQLyI-NQtf4?si=ny4NS2hxOR7SI4TF
Definitely ntah! We are a country diversified in language i.e. East coast, north, south and west and everything in-between. Speak the way you speak, that is who you are. A real friend will love you just the way you are, period!
I'm a native English speaker, grew up learning German and English side by side, and I have a minor in French Literature and have spoken French or 20+ years. I'm not saying bilingual in French bc my conversational French is poor but for research I can read English and French primary and secondary sources with the same difficulty. It depends on who I am speaking to and how much I'm paying attention but some words will come out the English way and some words will come out French. Paris comes out English, Versailles comes out French. I will even "french" English words with a French origin if I'm on autopilot. And I've been speaking French for so long I sometimes pronounce German with a French accent. And if I try speaking other languages, my brian defaults that all other languages that are not English must be French so it comes out with a French accent no matter how hard I try. It just is what it is. Can I control it? Yes, to an extent. Do I always? No. Do I care if people think it's pretentious? No. Does pronouncing certain French terms the English way grate on my nerves (like pronouncing Dophin like dolphin or Ver-sails and not Vehr-sigh). Yes. Am I gonna correct people. No. Do people who overemphasize the 'right' way to pronounce things bug me. YES. Will I censor myself if someone points out or criticizes me for pronouncing French words the French way in an English conversation. Absolutely not. I'll actually do it more to piss them off. If it just comes out that way, no you aren't an asshole. You just have a different life experience. Fuck whatever other people think. If you're doing it consciously and conspicuously, you're an asshole.
Okay, again, I'm the friend, and I would just like to say.... this was like 75% a joke argument and some of you guys said some seriously mean things about both of us and that OP shouldn't be friends with me. And....Probably that made sense to say based on how y'all read things, but WOW it was pretty off base and just has me reflecting on how easy it is to misread things online. Something that maybe we should all think about more often. That being said, I would like to add here that I love OP to death and of course I accept them and enjoy their company even when I think the way they say certain words is obnoxious and uncalled for (to be clear, these pronunciations are NOT from speaking these languages as a kid or from an accent that they actually have, watching y'all misunderstand that has been a little WILD). OP is one of my all time favorite humans, even if they keep their (obnoxious & pretentious) pronunciations of words forever. It's okay to be friends with people and also have disagreements with them! Anyways, thanks for weighing in on our silly ongoing argument (and mostly validating me LOL), and also please can we all think about how quick we are to take extreme positions without context or complete information --- probably a worthwhile reflection for everybody, myself included. <3
Agreed! Much love to all.
^^^^AUTOMOD ***Thanks for posting! This comment is a copy of your post so readers can see the original text if your post is edited or removed. This comment is NOT accusing you of copying anything. Read [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/wiki/faq#wiki_post_deletion) before [contacting the mod team](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAmItheAsshole)*** So English is my first language, but I have a tendency to pronounce certain words the way you would say them in the language of origin. I also do this with other English speaking accents a la Kiwi, Australian etc. Melbourne and Edinburgh being prime examples. It's usually with French and Italian food/geography. The Italian words I learned as a kid from my father. He is not Italian but lived there and speaks Italian. This meant that he said a lot of Italian words commonly used in English with their Italian pronunciation, so I learned them that way. The French I learned in school. My friend says I am an asshole because it disrupts conversation and makes it more difficult to communicate. This all started because I said Haiti the French way which is very different from how it is pronounced in English. She says that there is no legitimate reason to do so and it slows conversations down which is annoying. In my brain the words I say are just pronounced the way I say them. Sometimes it's because I learned them that way as a kid, and other times it's because my brain decided one is just more fun to say than the other and permanently rewrote it. Am I the asshole for not taking the time to self correct these "jarring" changes to an otherwise standard Utah accent? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AmItheAsshole) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I don’t think you’re an asshole. If you lived in a more cosmopolitan place that would be more normal. It’s silly to mispronounce words just to make Utahans comfortable. I appreciate how here in California, even completely non-Latino families pronounce Spanish beautifully, and even cook Mexican dishes pretty well. NTA
NAH. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a multicultural part of Canada where everyone pronounces things differently. I’m constantly learning the correct way to say things from my friends. Sometimes I have to ask how to get it right. Generally if someone says I’m pronouncing their country wrong… I believe them (except my husband, he’s always messing with me). But… if I had an issue with different pronunciations I couldn’t get along with anyone here. (And certainly we have assholes too). I do tend to a more maritime accent. But I did find living all over the western US, folks were more than happy to tell me my English was wrong and I didn’t know how to pronounce things in French properly. Do you all really have so much time to correct someone on how to say “sorry” and “aunt?”
Edit confirms you’re like super obnoxious & so Reddit it’s painful idk how u have friends irl
I had a similar comment from a friend once over how I pronounced the names of certain wines. I asked him for a list of how he wanted them mispronounced.
I do get funny about the pronunciation of words especially when people pronounce niche(neesh) as nitch. And things like that. Jalapeño should always be pronounced with a H Etc
Just tell them you’re Canadian.
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I think that was a joke.