Mispronunciation: Why You Should Stop Correcting People’s Mistakes

A recent survey of 2,000 adults in the UK identified the top ten “mispronunciations” people find annoying. Thankfully the majority (65%) of annoyed people don't feel comfortable correcting a speaker in public.

But leaving aside the fact that 2,000 is hardly a representative sample of the UK, with its population of over 66 million, this survey raises longstanding linguistic questions: why do people pronounce words differently, why does pronunciation change, and why does so-called mispronunciation upset some people to the point of making it possible (and interesting) to compile a top ten list?

I’m a phonetician – an expert in the way people make speech sounds and pronounce language. I’ve also written about what we can learn about a person from the way they speak.

A universal truth about language is that it is subject to constant change – and pronunciation is just as likely to change over time as aspects like grammar or vocabulary.

How language changes

One criticism of speakers who pronounce nuclear (“NU-cle-ar”) as “nucular” is that it does not match the spelling. In fact, English is known for having some very irregular spelling-to-sound correspondences, so that argument doesn't always hold up. The most extreme cases are probably family and place names: the surname [that looks like] Featherstonehaugh can be pronounced to sound like “Fanshaw,” for example, while Torpenhow in Cumbria is pronounced “Trepenna.”

How did we get to those pronunciations? Through a process of gradual, historical language change. These changes could be the result of social interaction (“other people say it like this”), mishearings, spelling pronunciations, phonetic processes or the influence of other languages, among other things. Certainly, language change is inevitable, which is handy because it keeps us linguists in business and generates a lot of copy for newspapers and the like.

Let’s have a look at some of the pronunciations people objected to in that survey.

Espresso

“Espresso” is pronounced “expresso” by many people, even though there is no “x” in the spelling. This...

Keep reading on Quick and Dirty Tips