I’ve always pronounced it “Lan-cee-a”, which is pretty much as I’ve heard it everywhere else in the UK.
There is a bit of an editing too and fro on the Wikipedia article though, that suggests “Lan-cha”. Any idea which is correct?
It’s closer to Lan-cha in Italy, at least if the TV ads were anything to go by.
The orthographic rules of standard Italian strongly suggest a “Lan-cha” pronunciation. I’d be interested to know if any of the Italian regional dialects render this word differently.
I asked about this sort of thing recently. The way it was explained to me in introductory Italian, the strings ‘ce’ and ‘ci’ would be pronounced somewhat as English speakers would pronounce “chey”* or “chee”, but in “cia”, “ciu”**, or “cio” the ‘i’ serves only to indicate that the ‘c’ should be pronounced as English “ch”, and hence should have no syllabic value.
Hence, typical Anglicized pronunciations like “lan-sea-uh” and “Gee Oh Vonny” are quite far off the mark.
- More or less. I was in Germany at the time and the class was being taught to German speakers.
** A local Italian wine shop near me gets it right. For Ciu-Ciu (“choo choo”) wines, their circulars usually make jokes about not missing the train before it pulls out of the station.