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I feel bad for anyone who tries to get English pronunciation "correct". I'm Canadian. My family is of Scottish, Irish, and English descent. I am painfully awar

I feel bad for anyone who tries to get English pronunciation "correct". I'm Canadian. My family is of Scottish, Irish, and English descent. I am painfully aware of how many dialects, exceptions to words, weird pronunciations, and accents affect what should be the same word. My wife is Russian and is fluent in English from having lived here in Canada since she was a child. We regularly get into arguments about how something is pronounced. Most of the time, we find that it's commonly said one way here in this part of Canada, but has 1 different pronunciation in a different part of Canada and 3 more pronunciations back in the UK or Australia. Since Canada is very multi-cultural and there are real Scottish, Irish, Indian, Australian, etc speakers everywhere here, who can say what is the right way to say a word in English? Can we really say that the word is supposed to be X when I have 5 people in the room, all with legitimate other ways to say it that are true for their version of English? Who is right? Does it matter who is right? How much should we care about correct pronunciation at all? It's not even a pedantic discussion anymore for me, it's a legitimate and real confusion day-to-day. As an example, I went to the above linked "youglish" site and it gave a suggestion for "courage". Some semi-British, possibly Eastern US sounding person said "coo-rah-dg" but here in my part of Canada, I would say it as "cur-ah-dg". They sound rather different and in passing, you might even think I'm saying a different word than "courage". Both are right, but here is a website that will cause someone to tell me my pronunciation is wrong. I feel like English is too broken and disparate in its many acceptable spoken variations to have a site like this ever work without stoking further arguments.

filereaper 5y ago
Yup, I feel this. Take for example "Regina", I've always pronouced it re-gih-na, how Regina Saskatchewan was pronounced on CBC and elsewhere. But here was a lady with same name of Regina who pronounced it re-gi-nah which I guess is more common south of the border?
bluGill 5y ago
This is a real problem. If we don't come up with one single correct way to pronounce every single word, English will fork into multiple different languages. This has happened - English at the core is based on German (an old German not spoken anymore - and one we probably can't reconstruct), but the French and other influences over the years mean few can find anything in common with German (which has gone a different way). I could also point out Spanish/Italian, or Swedish/Danish. I have no doubt that you can find the same in Africa and Asia, but I don't know enough about their languages to comment. While we are at it, can we reform English spelling to make sense?
- retrac 5y ago
  > This is a real problem. If we don't come up with one single correct way to pronounce every single word, English will fork into multiple different languages. It is probably unpreventable. Language change occurs precisely because of insufficient contact/exposure, causing divergence, or allowing it to persist. Dialects with lots of bidirectional exchange tend to shift towards each other. Besides, that ship sailed. English dialects have arisen on multiple continents and are diverging. I speak fairly standard Canadian English and there some dialects I need a fair bit of time to acclimate to when I encounter them. Unless electronic media and social change pulls some wildcard on language acquisition (who knows?) it's quite possible that in a few hundred more years the gap between spoken English on the street in New York and London may be as wide as German and Dutch today.
- hencq 5y ago
  > English at the core is based on German (an old German not spoken anymore - and one we probably can't reconstruct) This is just plain wrong, or at the very least very misleading. It's true that English is at its core a Germanic language. As is German, but it's fairer to say that both languages share a common ancestor. And in fact, we can and have reconstructed these older ancestor languages. In fact, most European languages descend from Proto-Indo-European, which has also been reconstructed to quite some detail. I can heartily recommend this podcast[1] by the way, which goes into a lot more detail about this as well as the history of how these things got discovered. [1] - https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/ https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/
  - bluGill 5y ago
    You are correct.
amatecha 5y ago
Ah yeah, as someone who has grown up on Canada's west coast, sometimes I see a video of someone in a certain region of England (for example) and I can barely understand them. It's supposedly the same language, but wowzers, the variation in accent is very broad around the world! I was watching a show where a woman was named "Emma" and I literally 100% thought her name was "Emer" because of the way they were pronouncing her name. I was like "huh, that's an interesting name"! haha
- Symbiote 5y ago
  Emer, or Eimhear, is a an Irish name. It rhymes with lemur, or emer[gency]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emer
  - amatecha 5y ago
    haha, yeah, no her name was in fact Emma though (it showed her name in text later on). It's not the first time I totally misunderstood a word due to pronunciation! haha
TacticalCoder 5y ago
> I feel bad for anyone who tries to get English pronunciation "correct". Well that's the wrong way to look at it. There's not one objectively correct pronunciation but there are a great many objectively totally incorrect ones. I've got an horrible french accent when I speak english and it's just obviously and non-disputably wrong and bogus. My daughter, on the other hand, has been raised watching english-only cartoons and going since years to british colleges and she definitely has an accent that many would think is native. The goal shouldn't be to get the "correct" pronunciation: the goal should be to not get an incorrect one.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- softfalcon 5y ago
  Maybe I am looking at it the wrong way, but at least my way of looking at it prevents me from judging how others speak. While I admire your want to not have the “incorrect” pronunciation. I don’t think it’s necessary or even really all that important. Don’t let great be the enemy of good and all that. I call this a win as it makes me more accepting of others instead of trying to be “right” like so many native English speakers try to be (which is incredibly obnoxious and elitist).
jjeaff 5y ago
Few native English speakers have any problem with various different ways that some words can be pronounced. The kind of pronunciation projects like this are talking about is pronouncing it correctly enough that it can be understood.

filereaper 5y ago

Yup, I feel this. Take for example "Regina", I've always pronouced it re-gih-na, how Regina Saskatchewan was pronounced on CBC and elsewhere. But here was a lady with same name of Regina who pronounced it re-gi-nah which I guess is more common south of the border?

bluGill 5y ago

This is a real problem. If we don't come up with one single correct way to pronounce every single word, English will fork into multiple different languages. This has happened - English at the core is based on German (an old German not spoken anymore - and one we probably can't reconstruct), but the French and other influences over the years mean few can find anything in common with German (which has gone a different way). I could also point out Spanish/Italian, or Swedish/Danish. I have no doubt that you can find the same in Africa and Asia, but I don't know enough about their languages to comment. While we are at it, can we reform English spelling to make sense?

retrac 5y ago
> This is a real problem. If we don't come up with one single correct way to pronounce every single word, English will fork into multiple different languages. It is probably unpreventable. Language change occurs precisely because of insufficient contact/exposure, causing divergence, or allowing it to persist. Dialects with lots of bidirectional exchange tend to shift towards each other. Besides, that ship sailed. English dialects have arisen on multiple continents and are diverging. I speak fairly standard Canadian English and there some dialects I need a fair bit of time to acclimate to when I encounter them. Unless electronic media and social change pulls some wildcard on language acquisition (who knows?) it's quite possible that in a few hundred more years the gap between spoken English on the street in New York and London may be as wide as German and Dutch today.
hencq 5y ago
> English at the core is based on German (an old German not spoken anymore - and one we probably can't reconstruct) This is just plain wrong, or at the very least very misleading. It's true that English is at its core a Germanic language. As is German, but it's fairer to say that both languages share a common ancestor. And in fact, we can and have reconstructed these older ancestor languages. In fact, most European languages descend from Proto-Indo-European, which has also been reconstructed to quite some detail. I can heartily recommend this podcast[1] by the way, which goes into a lot more detail about this as well as the history of how these things got discovered. [1] - https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/ https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/
- bluGill 5y ago
  You are correct.

amatecha 5y ago

Ah yeah, as someone who has grown up on Canada's west coast, sometimes I see a video of someone in a certain region of England (for example) and I can barely understand them. It's supposedly the same language, but wowzers, the variation in accent is very broad around the world! I was watching a show where a woman was named "Emma" and I literally 100% thought her name was "Emer" because of the way they were pronouncing her name. I was like "huh, that's an interesting name"! haha

Symbiote 5y ago
Emer, or Eimhear, is a an Irish name. It rhymes with lemur, or emer[gency]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emer
- amatecha 5y ago
  haha, yeah, no her name was in fact Emma though (it showed her name in text later on). It's not the first time I totally misunderstood a word due to pronunciation! haha

TacticalCoder 5y ago

> I feel bad for anyone who tries to get English pronunciation "correct". Well that's the wrong way to look at it. There's not one objectively correct pronunciation but there are a great many objectively totally incorrect ones. I've got an horrible french accent when I speak english and it's just obviously and non-disputably wrong and bogus. My daughter, on the other hand, has been raised watching english-only cartoons and going since years to british colleges and she definitely has an accent that many would think is native. The goal shouldn't be to get the "correct" pronunciation: the goal should be to not get an incorrect one.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
softfalcon 5y ago
Maybe I am looking at it the wrong way, but at least my way of looking at it prevents me from judging how others speak. While I admire your want to not have the “incorrect” pronunciation. I don’t think it’s necessary or even really all that important. Don’t let great be the enemy of good and all that. I call this a win as it makes me more accepting of others instead of trying to be “right” like so many native English speakers try to be (which is incredibly obnoxious and elitist).

jjeaff 5y ago

Few native English speakers have any problem with various different ways that some words can be pronounced. The kind of pronunciation projects like this are talking about is pronouncing it correctly enough that it can be understood.