Kamala among year’s most mispronounced names

US Vice President Kamala Harris waves at supporters at the end of her concession speech at Howard University in Washington, DC, on November 6, 2024. —Agence France-Presse

DALLAS, Texas — Vice President Kamala Harris and breakout pop star Chappell Roan were among the year’s most talked-about people. Their names were also among the most mispronounced.

On Wednesday, the language-learning company Babbel and closed-captioning company The Captioning Group released a list of the words that news anchors, politicians and other public figures in the United States struggled with the most in 2024.

The list also provides a retrospective of the year’s most discussed topics and people, from pop culture to politics.

“It’s a nice way to kind of look back into the year and see everything that has happened,” said Esteban Touma, a linguistic and cultural expert at Babbel.

Roan—whose hits include “Good Luck, Babe!”—shot to fame this year and is nominated for six Grammy awards. According to the list, her name is pronounced CHAP-uhl ROHN, not SHA-pel ROW-an.

Left tongue-tied

During Harris’ unsuccessful run for president this year, her great-nieces took to the stage at the Democratic National Convention to clear up how to say her first name, pronounced COM-a-la. Also making the list was US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, whose last name still leaves people tongue-tied. During his 2020 presidential run, his campaign made posters and T-shirts with the pronunciation “Boot-Edge-Edge” to help.

Other words on the list include:

• Dutch Kooikerhondje, pronounced COY-ker-HUND-che, is a breed of dog that made it’s way into the lexicon this year. This is largely because Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani has a Kooikerhondje called Decoy who won the hearts of fans while delivering a ceremonial first pitch.

• The name of the actress Zendaya, who starred in “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.

• Newly discovered exoplanet Speculoos-3b is pronounced SPEK-yuh-lohss three bee.

• 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 last name of Irish actor Barry Keoghan, who 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’s not surprising that they would be mispronounced in the United States. The key to pronouncing them correctly, she said, would probably just be hearing them spoken, she said.

“There aren’t really tricks short of knowing how orthology works in that language,” she said.

Several of the words on the US list, including Keoghan, Phryge and Shein, also made the list for the UK, which Babbel compiled with the help of the British Institute of Verbatim Reporters, an organization for subtitling professionals.

Keep trying

Other words on the UK 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 made the list after the British government this year returned sovereignty of the long-contested Indian Ocean archipelago to Mauritius.

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 our mouths are not trained to do these sounds that come from different languages,” he said.

Touma admitted even he struggles with some words, including Harris’ first name. Even though he knows the correct pronunciation, he said, it’s hard to get it correct in the moment when he’s in a conversation.

As Roan’s music gained popularity over the year, it was interesting cultural moment to watch as people learned 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.