I don’t know where this really belongs… IMHO sounds good I guess.
Okay, from the perspective of my part of Ohio (Dayton), Cleveland and NE Ohio in general might as well be in a different state, for all we hear of it. This is why, despite being from Ohio myself, I have to ask this question.
The question is this: do you pronounce “Cuyahoga” at all strangely? I’ve been hearing a girl from Cleveland in one of my classes say things about Cuyahoga County a few times, and she seems to pronounce the word in a strange, slurred fashion that is difficult to transcribe. I guess something like “C’hoga” is the closest I can come, though it’s not quite like the way you are probably reading that in your mind. But then, she always talks really fast and I can’t understand half of what she says anyway. But still, it made me wonder- do most people up there actually pronounce the whole word, rather than skipping over the middle?
Well, I would guess that saying KIE uh HOE guh really fast might turn into kyuh HO guh. I have heard a few people say kuh yuh HOE guh, so it might be that variant, but most of the people with whom I associate put the hardest stress on the third syllable and the next hardest stress on the first syllable, rhyming “Cuy” with “sky.”
Cleveland actually supports several different accents, beginning with the base accent of the Northen U.S. Dialect, with modifications and additions from the black community, strong Balkan immigrant communties, a visible Italian immigrant community, a weaker Polish immigrant community, and quite a bit of influence from Appalachia and Western Pennsylvania. Therefore, it is possible to find words around Cleveland that are not even pronounced the same among multiple Cleveland neighborhoods.
I’ve never heard anyone not pronounce all four syllables. But there’s disagreement about the pronunciation of the third (stressed) syllable, whether the “O” is long or short.
You know, I live in Cuyahoga County – South Euclid, to be precise – and I was just going to post this question myself, being a new resident here. I always pronounced “Cuyahoga” the same way as it’s said in the REM song of the same name - kuy-a-HO-guh.
I’ve heard “kuy-a-HOG-uh” quite a bit in the eastern suburbs.
The worst I’ve heard is something like KAAAH-uh-guh, which is more or less the way my father pronounced it. But he was from Monroe County (i.e., the middle of nowhere in the southeast part of the state).
I’ve never lived there, but my in-laws live in Cleveland and I’ve spent a lot of time up there. I can tell you with absolute certainty that the proper pronunciation is:
I think that’s my favorite. Though on preview, I see that vanilla’s pronunciation is good, too.
Anyway, I guess I’ll just blame what I heard on the girl’s rapid speech; sounds like most people pronounce it normally.
This reminds me of my roommate from Nepal. As he would see signs on the roads around the Columbus area, he insisted that the local pronunciation of “Gahanna” was not as it should be. He thought it should be pronounced like “Ghana.” He also hated seeing the name “Wheeling” (as in the city in West Virginia) on the signs for I-270 as you approach it from the north. But now I’m just rambling…
Columbus, OH here. I make SURE I pronounce all 4 syllables. This is because I hate both the Southern Ohio twang accent and the Northeastern OH/Western PA accent.
Born and raised on the East Side of Cleveland. Grew up in University Heights. Always heard it there as kye-a-HOG-a, without exception. But once I heard a guy from the West Side pronounce it in three slurred syllables as kuh-HOG-a and thought it was because he was an uneducated moron.
If you think southern Ohio and northern Ohio are dissimilar, that’s nothing compared to the vast existential gulf that separates Cleveland’s East Side and West Side.
In Hindi or Urdu, the name Cuyahoga asks a question about the future: kya hoga — ‘what will be?’
The strange thing is the way the stressed syllable changes, depending on context. For the name “Cuyahoga,” by itself, everyone agrees that the third syllable is stressed. But when I hear “Cuyahoga County” or the “Cuyahoga River,” it’s actually the **first **syllable that people stress.
Like the name of the newspaper, the Plain Dealer. It’s a favorite way for native Clevelanders to identify anyone from out of town. The locals know that it’s pronounced as a single word PLAINdealer with the stress accent on the “Plain.” Anyone who pronounces it as two words with the stress on “Deal” is immediately marked as an outlander.
Odd, because shifting the stress forward to the first syllable is usually a Southernism (e.g. saying police as POlice). Cleveland speech is about as Nothern as they come. The Plain Dealer pronunciation is just a unique local anomaly.
Not even REM can get it straight; in the studio version of their song Cuyahogs, it’s pronounced coy-a-ho-ga; in the live version, it’s cuy-a-ho-ga. (Both files are MP3 snippets of the word “Cuyahoga” only; it’s not the entire song. )
On a related note: there’s a loval coffee house chain in the Cleveland area called Arabica. However, everyone here I know pronounces it “air-ub-BEE-ka” instead of “uh-RAHB-uh-kuj”, as the bean is pronounced.
