Gray-um. Definitely two syllables. US, grew up in the Midwest. Every Graham(e) I have known, first name or last, pronounces it that way.* Not that this is a huge sampling of people, of course.
*I did know a Graham who was the younger brother of a friend. The kids were both born in the UK and came to the US as small children. Everybody at school and in the neighborhood called Graham “Gray-um,” and Graham introduced him that way too. But my friend (his brother) called him “Gram.” Might’ve been a family nickname, or it might’ve been the way they said the name in Britain. I’ll probably never know :(.
Seriously the only time I’ve ever heard it pronounced as “Gram” is watching Canadian golfer Graham DeLaet and have the American announcers mangle his name into “Gram.”
Don’t worry, you will know! It’s not said that way in Britain. Either it was a family thing or it was because of wherever their parents were from - was it England or elsewhere?
That doesn’t really help, not knowing how you pronounce the cracker. Is that “gram” or “gray-um”? Incidentally, I checked dictionary.com, and the “gray-um” pronunciation was the first listed one, followed by “gram.” Same with Merriam-Webster, although that one also includes an option schwa on “gram,” reflecting the pronunciation Bootis was talking about.
See if you can find a youtube interview where someone doesn’t call him Gram Nash. I listened to several and even in the British interview I listened to the host said Gram.
My brother’s name is Graham, and whenever he’s speaking English it’s Grayum.
But we live in Montreal, where native French speakers pronounced it Gra-AM with a horrible gargling noise in the middle. Gra (choking/gargling) AMMM!
Graham tries to get them to eliminate the gargling noise, especially with his in-laws.
Until a few years back and I heard him trying to correct someone. I looked at him and said he should tell them it’s closer to Guillaume (hard G. Gee-yohm).
Particularly at around 19 seconds in, Kevin Bacon sounds like he’s saying Gram, but the rest of the people are definitely saying gray’um (I didn’t watch to the end).
Here’s a sound sample of one Kiwi pronouncing “Graeme” and it’s also a two-syllable or one-and-a-half syllable pronunciation. Or, whatever the case, it’s not “gram.”
In my experience, outsourced telephone customer service people use 2 syllables and everyone I know native to the U.S. says “Gram.” This happened on the phone yesterday and reminded me of this thread.
I do not mean to say that phone customer service people are the only people I deal with from outside of the U.S. For quite some time I was rather prolific in international relations of a sort. In fact, I found my niche was dealing exclusively with non-U.S. social partners. But they always took my lead on the pronunciation, and if I said it was “Gram,” they said “Gram.”
