'Tom-ay-to' or 'Tom-ah-to'? How To Pronounce 'Tomato'

In the world of great debates, there is one that has been long enduring and still keeps language prescriptivists awake at night: Is it "tom-ay-to" or "tom-ah-to"?  Now, this may not seem as pressing as whether nuclear fusion is possible, but to people in the linguistic trenches, it is pretty darn close. After all, how many linguistic pronunciation ambiguities have been so long running and widely known that they have actually inspired a song?

So is it 'tom-ay-to' or 'tom-ah-to'?

To get to the bottom of the great tomato pronunciation debate, we have to go back —way past the Gershwins putting the ditty into the world.

'Tomato' was originally a Nahuatl word

According to linguist Jack Chambers, the fruit was brought over to Europe around 1500 by Spanish explorers who had developed a taste for it in the New World. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the original name—"tomatl"—came from Nahuatl, an Uto-Aztecan language spoken in parts of Mexico and Central America. Once across the pond, the word was nativized as it begun to be used by speakers of European languages, meaning adapted to fit the sound system of the borrowing language.

Europeans turned the Nahuatl word into 'tom-ah-to'

In Spanish, the name for these little beauties was "tomate" (pronounced "tom-ah-te"), based on the sound system of Spanish, which, like most Romance languages, used a long "a" vowel (pronounced "ah") which was the closest vowel sound to the one heard in the original Nahuatl word. This pronunciation was then adopted by the British, who used a similar "ah" vowel (sort of like we hear in the British-sounding pronunciation of "father"). So, this foreign loan-word nativization process would seem to argue that "tom-ah-to" is the accurate loan-word form, at least outside of the real McCoy, "tomatl."

The Americans turned the British word into 'tom-ay-to' (but the British used that pronunciation too)

Well, it’s not quite so clear cut. American colonists, always a bit wayward, had also learned about and cultivated tomatoes but pronounced the word with a different vowel sound, the diphthongal [e] vowel (pronounced "ey" like in "hey").  According to socio-phonetician Charles Boberg’s work on foreign loan word nativization, this "ey" pronunciation was actually a common pronunciation assigned to many foreign loan words spelled with a similar vowel, like "potato," that had been borrowed into English prior to 1500—before the Great...

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