A list of mispronounced words provides a retrospective of 2024, from Kamala to Chappell
DALLAS– Vice President Kamala Harris and breakthrough pop star Chappell Roan were among the most talked-about people of the year. Their names were also among the most mispronounced.
On Wednesday, language learning company Babbel and subtitling company The Captioning Group published a list of the words that newscasters, politicians and other public figures in the US struggled with most in 2024. The list also offers a look back at the year’s most talked about topics and people, from pop culture to politics.
“It’s a nice way to look back on the year and see everything that happened,” said Esteban Touma, a linguistic and cultural expert at Babbel.
Roan – whose hits include “Good Luck, Babe!” – became famous this year and was nominated for six Grammy awards. According to the list, her name is pronounced CHAP-uhl ROHN, not SHA-pel ROW-an.
During Harris’ failed bid to become president this year, her great-nieces entered the fray stage at the Democratic National Convention to clarify how to say her first name, pronounced COM-a-la. The US Secretary of Transportation was also on the list Pete Buttigieg, whose last name still leaves people speechless. During his 2020 presidential run, his campaign made posters and T-shirts with the phrase “Boot-Edge-Edge” to help.
Other words on the list include:
— The Dutch Kooikerhondje, pronounced COY-ker-HUND-che, is a dog breed that found its way into the lexicon this year. This is largely because Shohei Ohtani, Los Angeles Dodgers superstar has a Kooikerhondje named Decoy who captured the hearts of fans as he played a ceremonial first pitch.
— The name of the actress Zendaya, who played the lead role “Challengers,” is often mispronounced as zen-DIE-uh, but it should be zen-DAY-a.
—Online fast-fashion giant Shein is SHE-in, not SHEEN.
– The newly discovered exoplanet Speculoos-3b is pronounced SPEK-yuh-lohss three by.
— Phryge, the mascot of the Paris Olympics, is pronounced FREE-je. It was a nod to the Phrygian cap, an emblematic accessory of the French revolutionaries.
— Semaglutide, the drug in weight loss medications Ozempic and Wegovy, is pronounced sem-ah-GLOO-tide, not SEE-mah-gloo-tide.
— The surname of an Irish actor Barry Keoghanwhich starred in ‘Saltburn’, is pronounced key-OH-gin.
Nancy Niedzielski, chair of the linguistics department at Rice University in Houston, points out that most of the words on the list are not English, so it is not surprising that they are mispronounced in the US. The key to pronouncing it correctly, she said: would probably just hear them speak.
“There are actually no tricks to knowing how orthology works in that language,” she said.
Several words on the US list, including Keoghan, Phryge and Shein, were also on the list for Britain, which Babbel compiled with the help of the British Institute of Verbatim Reporters, an organization for subtitle professionals.
Other words on the British list include flygskam, a Swedish term pronounced FLEEG skam, popularized by climate activist Greta Thunberg, which translates as ‘flight shame’, and the Chagos Islands, pronounced CHAY-goss, which joined the list after the British government returned sovereignty of the long-disputed Indian Ocean archipelago to Mauritius this year.
Touma, a native Spanish speaker, said if you can’t pronounce a word, it’s important to just keep trying.
“One of the problems we have is that our mouths are not trained to hear these sounds from different languages,” he said.
Touma admitted that even he has trouble with some words, including Harris’ first name. Although he knows the correct pronunciation, he said, it is difficult to get it correct when he is in conversation.
As Roan’s music gained popularity over the year, it was an interesting cultural moment to see people learning to pronounce her first and last name, he said.
“The way we create understanding with each other is just trying to do these things,” Touma said.