Keep hearing this word in various commercials and whatnot, and it bugs me when people pronounce it using English phonics rules, which I find rather strange. A French speaker might get a little miffed if us Americans said “horz dee ovress” for hors d’oeuvres-so why the long e and the lack of the “rolled” n every time I hear jalapeno in American television? One complicating factor is that the vowel in question, which is ostensibly an e, kind of ends up sounding like an English long a because of the wavy n that follows. What makes it even weirder is that the “j” is said the correct way (as an English “h” sound).
On a stick!
Other. Ha-la-PEY-nyo. There’s a tilde over the ‘n’ (eñe – ‘enya’).
Neither of your choices are correct. As Johnny L.A. says, it’s hahl-ah-pey-nyo.
ha-lah-pain-yo
ja-la-PEH-nyo.
5 minute window my ass. Pretend my ‘j’ is an ‘h.’ I can’t help but to read them as the same thing, even though in English, they are not.
hal-a-pen(enya)-o
You’d be surprised how many people here pronounce it as it’s spelt: jala-pen-o. Here being the Land of Eternal Rain, otherwise known as the UK. I’ve heard this all up and down the country, from people of all ethnic backgrounds. It used to make my SO at the time (who was American) cringe every time she heard it.
Mine: hahl-ah-pey-nyo
As an American in Ireland, I have to fight the urge to correct the staff in the burrito bar every time I go there. (Admittedly, I don’t always fight it as hard as I probably should :o )
And if you think their mangling of “jalapeños” is bad, you should hear what they do to “quesadilla”…
Might I point you toward the nearest loony bin, if you’re going to insist on applying logic to the English language?
As a current LA resident, I’ve got to agree with Johnny L.A.
You do realize that the word “jalapeño” is Spanish and not English, right?
Okay, since clearly the OP’s intent was to see how we pronounce second-to-last syllable, let’s forget about the ñ for now. That said, am I the only one who does not pronounce it “pee” or “pey”? It’s “peh.”
Another vote for Ha-la-PEY-nyo
Yes and no. It has entered common English at this point. List to what the Merriam-Webster editor says about a word that enters English from a foreign language around 1:18 of this video.
Eh…nitpicking…It is clear to me that the “h” is not really pronounced the same as it is in English…more like “(h…) Al-eh-pen-hyo” than either of the options, but the second in the poll came pretty close.
These subtle aspects…I am a native of Houston, Texas, and there have been rabid debates between natives (and others) re’ the “correct” pronounciation; some insist it is HOOston, others YUUston (either of which is ridiculous if taken at face value). Hello, it is BOTH…HYUSTON… :smack:
We-ellll, I would argue that “jalapeño” is less a new English word and more what Alan Bliss would call a foreign word in current English usage, which operates under somewhat different rules. It hasn’t really been fully assimilated the way “octopus” (from your example, which is really about grammatical manipulation rather than pronunciation anyway) has, and in particular the pronunciation of the “ñ” isn’t negotiable yet. I will concede that here in Texas I hear the “e” pronounced in a variety of ways, although going with the long E does make the person saying it sound like a gringo.
It’s a Spanish word, so I pronounce it as it is pronounced in Spanish: [xalaˈpeɲo].
A few years ago, I started pronouncing “jalapeno” like it was a regular English word as a bit of a joke. It’s something like dʒəˈlæpɨnoʊ (juh-LAP-in-no). And now it’s pretty much become the way I always pronounce it, except when I think about it, which I almost never do.
I’ve done the same thing with the street names here in Santa Barbara. It’s not helpful when I’m trying to give directions. Not at all.