I haven’t heard anyone mispronounce Cahuenga or La Cañada, but I heard an Englishman on a public radio station say ‘Sepple-veeda’ and ‘Puh-SAD-innuh’. 
(He may have been joking.)
Don’t call it a comeback.
Nobody calls L.A. by its full name of ‘El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Río de Porciúncula’. Everyone calls it L.A.
Please don’t call it ‘LA’. Different climate entirely.
Talking GPS units make mistakes all the time like that.
Here’s one that’s unlikely to be known by non-Wisconsinites: “Shawano,” a town in the Menominee Indian Reservation. It’s pronounced “SHAW-no” (one syllable), NOT “shuh-WAH-no” (two syllables). It’s an easy word to use to separate the natives from the tourists.
It is okay to say that you know the way to “San A Zay”?
San hO szay. The song gets it right.
Change your GPS language to Australian sometime. Makes good fun with USA pronunciations.
FWIW, we deliberately changed ours to Australian because the clarity and diction is better than with American English. Of course, it’s fun when we take a different route than what the GPS thinks we’re going … “Recalculating, … mate.”
Yes, the song does get San Jose right, but as a local I’d say the “alternate” pronunciation is heard just as much.
Same. I’m a native of the Philadelphia (you can totally call it Philly) suburbs, and all the Welsh town names around here instantly separate the natives from the transplants. Uwchlan and Tredyffrin are two near me that always trip people up.
And Lancaster is LANG-kuster, not LAN-CAST-er.
Lancaster, CA is LAN-caster.
That’s SOUTHERN California.
In the Bay Area, there is no the or I.
How do you get there? Well you could take 580 and connect to 5.
There’s a road in Asheville named Leicester Highway. I was told that you can call it LEE-cester, or you can call it Lester, but you better not ever call it LIE-chester.
I’m a lileflong Northern Californian and have never heard anybody (besides somebody who grew up somewhere else) say “The 101” (or “The 80” or “The 580”, for that matter). “The Bayshore” or “The Nimitz,” sure (although even those terms are hardly ever used any more), but not “The <number>”.
Speaking of not calling it things…don’t call it “NoCal”. The correct abbreviation for Northern California is “NorCal”. “NoCal” is a way to describe water. (I understand why people say it - “SoCal” is correct for Southern California, so they just figure NoCal is correct as well - but that doesn’t make it correct.)
How about “Sawn Ho-SAY”, which, IIRC, is how you pronounce the one in Costa Rica?
Just don’t call the Vietnamese section “Little Ho Chi Minh City”. I found it highly “coincidental” that United pretty much went out of its way to not say Ho Chi Minh City (the departure board at the gate used the airport code, SGN; the flight attendants kept calling it Saigon) for a flight from Boston to Ho Chi Minh City that went through San Francisco.
Huh. I’ve never heard “Sepulveda” pronounced but I would have guessed something like “Sepple-VAY-da”. I guess that’s not it. I see the original Spanish name has an accent on the U, so is it “Suh-POOL-vi-da”? Or an Anglicised “Seh-PUL-vi-da”?
I usually say Northern California. I’ve been known to say NorCal. I don’t say NoCal.
I absolutely love this faux complaint. I remember many, many years ago when a poster here brought this one up and less than 2 days later I saw a clip of the Governor of NJ saying exactly “New Joisey” on the news. (Among other Joisey-isms.)
All too often people with accents are unaware they have them and object to others echoing them back.
Anyway …
Oregonians rightfully object to the dreadful “Or-y-gawn” pronunciation. But for some reason the will insist it’s pronounced “Or-y-gun”. Actually, it’s pronounced “Or-gun” when they aren’t trying to highlight the pronunciation.
Okay, for the sake of clarity–having lived in New Jersey for more than thirty-five years, I have probably met less than ten people who talked like that for real. And the vast majority of them had close relatives from New York.
I can’t argue your point, but I can promise you that I can at least pronounce the name of the state I live in reliably. 
Please don’t call Long Island “LongGUYland.” In the several years I lived there I never heard anyone say that, except jokingly.
I have had this debate for decades. Once, at a meeting we had even taped, and I played back diehard Norcalers saying a slight “the” some of the time. But when I used that for evidence, the purists said “OH, well he was born in SoCal” “Oh, he lived in SoCal for a while” or even “His wife is from down there”. It became a “no true scotsman”.
And honestly, who gives a rats ass? It is not a mark of being low-class.
Like I said, the South almost always uses it and emphasizes it. The North uses it less often and it’s soft. But they do say it. Even traffic reporters.
We tend to use that pronunciation for our Sister City down South.
Even “The land of Cleve” is better than “the town where the river caught fire.”