Often, when talking to someone with a rural background, or hearing an interview with someone who was born and raised far from large cities, they’ll use a very distinctive pronunciation for two ethnic groups; “AYY-rab” and “EYE-tal-yun”.
When spoken with no racist context, for example “I heard you can get some good Eye-tal-yun food in New York”, are such pronunciations considered to be offensive? Are Italians offended by Eyetalyun, or Arabs by Ayrab? Is there any malicious intent behind such pronunciations like that of “nig-ra”?
I’ve heard plenty of people from the UK use the pronunciation /aɪtælɪən/ as well as /aɪtæljən/, both with the long I pronunciation at the beginning. I’m not saying it’s correct or even common there, but it certainly isn’t limited to the rural US.
I have never actually heard someone, in person, say /eɪræb/ for Arab, but I’ve heard it on television and other media sources.
I can’t comment on the offensiveness of the pronunciations. But anybody who would be that offended is either pedantic or thin-skinned, imo.
I mean, seriously, why not complain that we aren’t saying “italiano?”
I’m Italian and when I lived in rural Montana and heard people talk about “Eye-talians” (I seem to recall hearing “Ay-rab,” too), I was bemused and a little amused but not offended. It spoke more to their (shall we say) rural-ness and lack of exposure to non-German/Irish and non-Native cultures than to any racism they might harbor, it seemed to me. Although, I have to say, it took me a while to get used to it, because I couldn’t believe that people still used those pronunciations seriously and not as a caricature of provincial good-old-boys. Like, I knew they watch TV – surely they’ve heard “Italian” and “Arab” before?!
On the other hand, when my Montanan roommate called me an Italian whore for making a joke about her cats, I admit I was a little offended, but even then I was more bemused than anything. (How does implying I don’t like your cats connect with “whore”? Weird.)
At what point does it go from “unsophisticated” to regional variant? Seriously. Enough people say it that way that you can’t possibly condescend all of them, can you?
Webster’s supports /aireɪniən/ as an acceptable pronunciation. Also listed are /ɪraniən/ and /ɪreɪniən/, with the latter given precedence, but precedence does not equal superiority.
For Iraqi I see only /iræki/ and /iraki/. No /ai-/ variants are listed. However, dictionaries seldom update often enough to accurately record contemporary language, so that’s not to say it won’t eventually be included in a newer edition.
Offensive? No. But it does smack of uncultured, crass, navel-gazing, inward-looking ignorance to me, and a person who says that will never have my respect. But I don’t think it’s offensive.
So, I find myself entirely unable to make sense of the fancy phoenetic spellings used in this thread. Can anybody tell me, using the perhaps less scientific style of approximated-phonetic spelling, the “correct” ways to say these names? ie: Is it “Ee-rak”, “Eye-Rake”, “Eye-rak”, or any other possible variation?
Whenever I hear EYE-talian, I always want to ask if whatever it is came from EYE-taly. And AYY-rab makes me think of that episode of Lost: “Hey! Captain Ayy-rab! Shut the hell up!”
So, anyway, it never occurred to me to find those pronunciations offensive. I do, however, find them amusing.
It’s offensive if the person saying it normally uses a different pronunciation - if they’re just acting ugly. I’ve heard people do this and it felt racist at the time.
The pronunciation of *Puerto Rico *as *Porta Rick-a * is grating to my ears for some reason.
This reminds me of a joke I saw somewhere on the net a while back that fell completely flat due to pronounciation differences:
Q: Where does Saddam Hussein keep his wine?
A: In Iraq
My first response to that was “Assuming Mr. Hussein drinks wine, of course he keeps in Iraq. He lives there. Runs the country, as I recall.”
The thing is, the joke relied on “Iraq” being pronounced by the reader as “Ee-Rack”, as in “A Wine Rack, ha ha, get it?”. Which might seem like the right pronounciation for someone in the US, But since I (and everyone else I know, and none of us live in the US) pronounces the country’s name as something like “Eyerahrk”, I was just sitting there thinking “I don’t get it. ”
I distinctly remember saying Eye-talian as a kid & being corrected immediately. By my grandmother, I believe. A Midwesterner, she’d raised her kids in Texas without letting them sound like dumb rednecks. She continued the practice with her grandchildren. (I did pick up a few Irish-American language tricks that my mother had learned from my father & his family. But he’d died young & we were raised very far from New England.)
If somebody is really very rural–especially if they are somewhat elderly–I’d just accept the pronunciation as part of the package. If the pronunciation sounds like a put-on, I’d wonder what the hell they were trying to do; being offensive is one possibility. (Only grandmothers get to make corrections!)
Once, I made the mistake of repeating The N Word in front of my grandmother. And learned to never, ever use that word again.
This is it. I’m not offended if someone refers to my heritage as Eye-talian. But there’s no quicker way for me to write someone off as an inbred hick than by using that pronounciation.
Oh god.
So if you don’t say Italian with a long E, it’s an ‘Eh’ sound? Or is it just the pause after the I that’s bad?
I think I say Arab right (I rhyme it with scarab, though I guess whether or not I say that right is up for grabs). But I’ve always said Iraq with a long I.
I will apparently never be able to escape my south Georgia upbringing.
I’d like to add, it never occurred to me that these pronunciations would be offensive or ignorant, and I don’t think it occurs to most other people with these accents either. It’s just the way we learned to talk and how most people around us sound.
Without giving it a lot of thought it has always sounded ignorant to me when I hear the Eye-talion pronunciation. But I only get offended by context not just the pronunciation itself.
Usually if you hear it that way in NJ the person is trying to be offensive and the context usually bears it out.
I don’t know any educated people who seriously pronounce it “aay-rab”, except that the nearby city of Arab, AL is pronounced that way. (We get a kick out of the fact that their high school mascot is an “Arabian Knight”, yet they use the image of a knight in shining armor.)
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