The other night, while watching SportsCenter on ESPN, there was a blurb about Dat Nguyen of the Dallas Cowboys. What pricked my ear, however, was how they pronounced his name. They pronounced it “Nen” (as in, the closer for the SF Giants), whereas I’ve always been told it was more like “Nwin”.
Are there two different pronunciations for this Vietnamese name, or is one of them incorrect?
say: “new yen”
Check the surnames without vowels thread.
Actually, it’s pronouced “wynn”!
All Vietnamese words are 1 syllable, it’s ngween. Just don’t drawl it out and say ngweeeeeen. Nguyen is a pretty common last name among Vietnamese people, moreso than Smith or Johnson. I’m Vietnamese, by the way. 
That is how I have heard it pronounced also.
It is NOT pronounced wynn. Vietnamese is a very tonal language, and if you mispronounce something, it means a completely different word. For example a rising cho is a completely different word then a falling cho. You DO pronounce the NG at the beginning of Nguyen. Where have you guys heard it pronounced wynn, a Vietnamese guy or a white football commentator?
Sorry for the Vietnamese grammar lesson there,
I have known many people with this last name, and each has pronounced it in a different way–Wynn, Nu-wyn, Ny-un. I suppose each of these represents an attempt to render the name pronouncable to us tongue-tied Americans.
I pronounce it the way each individual Mr. or Ms. Nguyen tells me to.
I’ve worked with a few Nguyens, and the majority of them tell us English speakers to pronounce it “Gwinn”. I usually try to get the “n” sound on the beginning. I think the closest approximation for the American tongue is “Ngwinn”, but it’s a bit tricky. You can do it with a bit of practice.
All righty…
Pronounce the “Ng” as a velar nasal consonant, as in “sing,” but not as in “finger” (in fact, the ng in “finger” is two sounds strung together, the velar nasal and a voiced velar stop (g)).
Pronounce the “uye” as if it were several vowels run together quickly: long u as in “rule,” semivowel ye as in “yell.”
Pronounce the “n” as a palatal nasal, as in “pin.”
Don’t linger on the y, or you’ll have two syllables.
LL
I knew a Vietnamese girl with Nguyen as her first name. She pronounced it “Wen”. She even wrote it that way sometimes.
For what it’s worth.
I have a college professor who also pronounces his last name as “when”.
This is another thing to hate the French for. They were in Vietnam and Frenchified the writing so that we can’t pronounce it. If the English were there Nguyen would have been Win.
The French always have to have the last word, they’re banning English and American words now.
My neighbor is Nguyen. He pronounces it Win and dangs the French for making it Nguyen. Since he is in the US, he wishes it was Win or whatever is easy for people to say. He’s tired of telling people from the countryside what it is, people in the high tech industry all know how to say it because there are a lot of Vietnamese there, and 1/2 of them are Nguyens!
With the French banning English words, we should ban all French words (including names). We should stop all French immigrants at the border and Anglicize their names. From Pierre to Paul, Jean to John, etc.
Chiming in because I work with a lot of Vietnamese. They pronounce it “ngwin”.
The word I have trouble pronouncing is “My” (there’s a miniature “question mark” thing over the right fork of the Y). It’s something something like “mayEE” (that tonal thing mentioned earlier coming in).
In that same vein, should Ng (another fairly common name) be pronounced “ing”, as in sing?
It’s incredible how fast people give up their old identities and start to actually accept the way English-speakers falsely try to pronounce their non-Anglo names, to the point that they don’t believe it was ever any different. (I have in fact encountered this quite a few times.)
I believe LL has given a good explanation of how to prounce the name (leaving out the tonals, but that would just complicate matters even more.)
The /ng/ sound at the beginning of words is indeed not only found in Vietnamese but in countless other languages around the world, as diverse as Albanian and Swahili. The fact the English-speakers have trouble with this and other sounds has nothing to do with French spellings. In fact, French doesn’t have this feature either, and they have a very hard time pronouncing it too. By the way, the Vietnamese writing system goes back to the Portuguese colonial period, and has nothing to do with French, IIRC.
I heard it pronounced ‘Wen’ from Dat Nguyen, himself. I’m in Dallas, so I’ve heard him in interviews a lot.
On ng…
The way I think of how to pronounce it initially, is to think of it as an N pronounced with the back of the tongue touching the velum (the soft palate). It’s hard to describe, you really have to hear it to get it right.
Tagalog is another language with an initial ng sound: ngipin - teeth, ngumiti - smile , ngayon - today. It used to be hard to do, but once you have it down, it’s pretty easy to pronounce.
Also, I remember my brother in HS used to have a Vietnamese friend named “Nga”. Everyone would say it as “Na”. I asked him one day if he had heard it with the velar nasal, and he confirmed.
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*Originally posted by Aglarond *
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My point, exactly. Of course, it is no wonder than someone so assimilated in American culture to play in the NFL would start pronouncing his name the “American” way. In fact the NFL is particularly full of long-time mispronounced German, Polish and other non-Anglo names.
I know a Nguyen. He pronounces it “Win”.