Since I first heard of the country, Qatar was pronounced ‘cut-TAR’. Then I started hearing it pronounced ‘cutter’. I’m sure I’ve heard a couple of other pronunciations too.
What is the correct pronunciation of Qatar?
Looks like there’s several options.
Not even The Cambridge Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary agree.
I don’t know that there’s a definitive single correct pronunciation for English speakers. In the local accent, it’s similar to cutter or gutter, but that doesn’t mean other languages have to use it. They assuredly don’t pronounce all of our proper nouns exactly like we do.
IIRC the national airline of Qatar pronounces it more like CAT-tar in its TV advertisements.
I have three dictionary apps that speak the word aloud on my phone. The Oxford Dictionary of English pronounces it cuTAR, The American Heritage Dictionary of English pronounces it cutter/gutter (it is a little ambiguous) and Mirriam-Webster doesn’t have an entry for it.
Maybe Paul will tell us.
I assumed that it was partly a matter of English not quite picking up the local pronunciation, and partly the image implications of sounding like “catarrh”
My wife is a native Arabic speaker (Egyptian) and she and her Egyptian friends pronounce it QAH-tar.
I use Q instead of K because the initial consonant is a distinct letter in Arabic that does not have an exact English equivalent. The closest we come in English is the way many people pronounce the c in calm. It is a k sound but the tongue contacts the palate much farther back.
The first vowel sound in the word does not exactly correspond to an English vowel sound and sounds partly like ah and partly like uh (IPA be damned). I used ah above because that’s what it sounds like most to me
The last syllable is less in dispute, sounding like the word t**ar with a rolled r.
I do not know how a Qatari would pronounce it; there is variation among Arabic dialects.
I think saying “cutter” is a total cop-out and sounds not even like a bad approximation of native pronunciation.
The U.S. newscasters I can recall pronounce it “cutter.” I can’t recall if I’ve ever heard a BBC newscaster say the word.
So, I guess all those years I was pronounciating it “CAY tar” is totally wrong, then?
We use “cutter” here at work. Still sounds stupid.
To expand on this a bit (and I Am Not a Linguist, so I’m not using technical terms, or technically correct transliteration markings and symbols):
In Arabic, Qatar is spelled with three consonants, Qaaf-Taa-Rai, and “short” vowels in between (written Arabic generally doesn’t include “short” vowels).
The Qaaf, as CookingWithGas indicates, represents a sound that doesn’t exist in English - the closes we can come is a sort of cross between a hard “K” and hard “G”. To me, it sounds more like a hard K, but depending on the native Arabic speaker and the native English listener, it might sound more like a hard “G”, hence “Gutter”.
The vowel following the Qaaf is the fatHa, which is usually pronounced similarly to an English short “a”. However, the Qaaf influences the pronunciation of the following vowel. To a native English speaker, the result may sound a bit like a short “u”.
The second consonant is Taa, which again doesn’t have an English language equivalent. It’s similar to the English “T”, but with a pronunciation that sounds a bit like the speaker is congested, and, like the Qaaf, influences the pronunciation of the following fatHa. (BTW, there is another Arabic letter, the taa, which is pronounced pretty much identically to the English “T”, and which can be very hard for a native English speaker to differentiate from the Taa, but to a native Arabic speaker they are different, easily distinguishable sounds.)
The terminal vowel, the Rai, is at least pretty straightforward for a native English speaker. It’s pretty much identical the English “R”.
Both syllables, with short vowels, receive equal stress.
Since I’m not a native Arabic speaker, and it’s been a long time since I studied it or talked with native Arabic speakers, I don’t know which English variant a native Qatari would consider closest to the correct pronunciation, but none of them are going to come very close, since it has sounds that simply don’t exist in English. After years of practice, my pronunciation of the Taa would pass without comment, so apparently I got that one pretty close to correct, but I had to repeat words with a Qaaf with some frequency to try to make my pronunciation understandable. And don’t even talk to me about the 'ayn and the ghayn…
My 1990 M-W shows three English pronunciations: *“kotter,” “gotter,” and “gutter,” all with stress on the first syllable. I can’t speak for other dictionary editors, but M-W says that order of pronunciations in no way indicates preferences.
But if you’re going for the way the locals do it, best of luck.
*Well, of course they were using diacriticals, so I’ve simplified that.
They only began doing that around the time of Desert Storm when some reporters went there and thought they sounded cool trying to pronounce it like a native. Before that, the rare times it was mentioned it was pronounced as ‘kuh - tar’ or ‘kah - tar’. I’m sure it was very rare for Americans to ever say it any other way until then.
In English, every word has one syllable that’s stressed (accented). If you put the stress on the wrong syllable, that’s clearly a wrong pronunciation. (“a-ME-ri-ca” is correct, “a-me-RI-ca” is clearly wrong.) So that’s often what English speakers worry about when pronouncing foreign words & names correctly.
I take it Arabic is not that way?
I once asked someone from the Qatar embassy in DC. He said what sounded like “gutter.”
It is that way, though there could be dialectical differences.
In Arabic, “long” vowels receive stress over short vowels, but Qatar has two “short” vowels. I think (though, again, it’s been a while) that Qatar is pronounced with a slight stress on the first syllable.
Iraq, in contrast, has a short initial vowel and a long vowel in the middle, so there’s a definite stress on the second syllable (it also has an 'ayn at the beginning, which is a sound so foreign to English it doesn’t even get transliterated in this case, and a Qaaf at the end, so, if you’re a native English speaker, no matter how you pronounce it, you’re wrong).
Kuwait, meanwhile, has two long vowels, with (I think) a slight stress on the second syllable. And it’s even pretty much pronounced like its English spelling! Except it’s actually al-Kuwait…
During one Olympics opening ceremony I remember the announcer saying it as “Cutter” and then saying that yes, it IS pronounced that way.
Here is the Wiki map showing how the pronunciation varies from q to g to a glottal stop to k and beyond, varying even within the Arabian peninsula. (How do you say “Gaddafi”?) Not all R’s are created equal, either.
I remember newsman Tom Brokaw pronouncing it GOT-ter, as in “I’ve got 'er.” I never have occasion to say it, but that’s how I thought it’s pronounced.
Brokaw also pronounces “Oregon” wrong. (Despite growing up far enough west to have known the right way.) He seems to have effected the speech of the NE upper class.
I wouldn’t use him as a pronunciation guide.