# Who decides “proper” pronunciation? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [June 2, 2025, 6:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111 "2025-06-02T18:12:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 11
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2025, 3:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/201 "2025-06-08T15:04:00Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > Some guy from New Jersey will not sound at all like someone from Arkansas. Someone from an English-speaking country other than the U.S. will generally be able to recognize that a speaker is from the U.S. They will not think that the New Jersey accent is not at all like the Arkansas accent. This is like saying that Americans listening to various accents in England will think that the accent in one region is not at all like the accent in another region. They will say that the two accents are from England, but they are different in some ways. Show me some statistics (not a Google overview) that show that Canadian-born people are more likely to become national news anchors in the U.S. than U.S.-born people are. It’s common that Canadians who’ve become successful at their jobs consider moving to the U.S. for a better job. Actors do this, for example. A country with a population of 340.1 million is more likely to have a better paying job than one with a population of 40.1 million. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2025, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/202 "2025-06-08T15:28:05Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > . This is like saying that Americans listening to various accents in England will think that the accent in one region is not at all like the accent in another region. They will say that the two accents are from England, but they are different in some ways. As an American who has been to England, i think that some accents in England are not at all like the accent from another region. Some English accents sound like English, with an English accent. And others are nearly impenetrable. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2025, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/203 "2025-06-08T15:28:51Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Someone from an English-speaking country other than the U.S. will generally be able to recognize that a speaker is from the U.S. They will not think that the New Jersey accent is not at all like the Arkansas accent. Well, I’m not from the US, and that’s exactly what I think. > [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > This is like saying that Americans listening to various accents in England will think that the accent in one region is not at all like the accent in another region. I’m not from England, either, and I can certainly recognize that the accent of King Charles and formerly of Queen Elizabeth are vastly different from the Cockney accent, not just “different in some ways”. > [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Show me some statistics (not a Google overview) that show that Canadian-born people are more likely to become national news anchors in the U.S. than U.S.-born people are. I never said that. Nor did I make any specific quantitative statement other than to say that “numerous US television anchors are Canadian imports”. **[That one I can back up.](https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/canadians-invade-us-news)** ---
**Author:** ![Moriarty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/moriarty/32/49_2.png) [@Moriarty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moriarty)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2025, 3:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/204 "2025-06-08T15:35:13Z")
> [@Hatchie](#): > > A favorite pronunciation site is [Youglish](https://youglish.com/). It won’t settle any disputes, but it lets you listen to speakers of three Englishes (UK, US, Australian) say any word you like, in context, scoured from online lectures or instructional videos so spoken by fairly erudite speakers. “Aluminum” is a great example of a word with wildly different pronunciations amongst the cultures. But, English spoken by Indian speakers has the most drift from American English, in my experience. When my son was a baby, we watched a lot of educational videos. Some were made by Indians, and their use of several words was downright jarring to me. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2025, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/205 "2025-06-08T15:38:21Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > numerous US television anchors are Canadian imports Yes, and numerous US actors, directors, and producers are from Canada. Some of them became famous on SNL. Like Lorne Michaels. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2025, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/206 "2025-06-08T20:43:17Z")
> [@Hatchie](#): > > There are plenty of words spoken one way uniformly in one group of speakers, a different way by another - try “gaseous”. Huh, really? Well- [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/rWSdm5w7N3M/hqdefault.jpg "How to Pronounce Gaseous (correctly!)") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWSdm5w7N3M) Johnny Carson- “I did did not know that!” You are absolutely correct. > [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Show me some statistics (not a Google overview) that show that Canadian-born people are more likely to become national news anchors in the U.S. than U.S.-born people are. I am not sure if that is true, but I am pretty sure that Canadians work in the American broadcast industry all out of proportion to the population difference. > [@wolfpup](#): > > Nor did I make any specific quantitative statement other than to say that “numerous US television anchors are Canadian imports”. I agree on that. ---
**Author:** ![redpoint5](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@redpoint5](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/redpoint5)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2025, 9:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/207 "2025-06-09T09:03:09Z")
I was raised to pronounce the word ‘niche’ as nichea… but recently all examples I hear are nitch. ---
**Author:** ![Stanislaus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/stanislaus/32/3391_2.png) [@Stanislaus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stanislaus)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2025, 9:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/208 "2025-06-09T09:59:27Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > Who decides? Self-appointed pedants. They don’t have any authority, but they’d like to you imagine that they have. Up to a point, yes. But there are correct and incorrect pronunciations, and it’s not just self-appointed pedants that decide them. To start at teh easy end of the scale: names. If Aji tells me that her name is pronounced to rhyme with bhaji and not as A.J. then she is not being pedantic to do so. Ditto place names - it’s Lester not Lie-cester as a simple fact of what the place is called. OK, fine, people have ownership over their names, and the names of their home towns, in a way that they don’t have over general language. But then you have words that are commonly mispronounced because they read differently seen in print: awry, chaos, misled, hyperbole. It isn’t, I think, pedantry to correct someone who gets these wrong (I was that person! I am glad to have been corrected!) simply because _it is wrong_. “Orry” isn’t an alternative pronunciation of “awry”, it’s a perfectly reasonable mistake. On the other hand, “fillum” is a perfectly acceptable pronunciation of film, for example. Partly because of simple numbers but also because it’s consistent with the regional dialect - e.g. the pronunciation matches similar words like “girrul”. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2025, 12:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/209 "2025-06-09T12:29:53Z")
Sure but it’s also important to remember that language isn’t static and the pronunciation of words is subject to natural change, and that change manifests at the lowest level, by people just doing it differently. The town of Bury (Greater Manchester or Lancs, depending who you ask) cannot agree, between themselves, how the name of their town is spoken. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2025, 12:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/210 "2025-06-09T12:41:59Z")
And I’ve always pronounced it Neesh. ---
**Author:** ![Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/earl_snake-hips_tucker/32/3269_2.png) [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2025, 12:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/211 "2025-06-09T12:50:06Z")
Ha! In elementary school once we had a spelling be in class, and for whatever reason, the teacher appointed a student to read a list of words. One of them was “awry,” which the reader pronounced as “aw-ry.” The \*student tasked with spelling it was befuddled and didn’t have a clue. The teacher later corrected the reader, at which point the student spelled correctly. \*AKA yours truly. ---
**Author:** ![Stanislaus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/stanislaus/32/3391_2.png) [@Stanislaus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stanislaus)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2025, 2:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/212 "2025-06-09T14:22:44Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > Sure but it’s also important to remember that language isn’t static and the pronunciation of words is subject to natural change, and that change manifests at the lowest level, by people just doing it differently. > > The town of Bury (Greater Manchester or Lancs, depending who you ask) cannot agree, between themselves, how the name of their town is spoken. Yes, like so many human things its incredibly fuzzy and there is definitely a point where on the one hand if you’re the only person saying it that way you’re just wrong and communicating poorly, and on the other where so many people are using an evolved pronunciation that they become correct because when they say it everyone understands what they mean without hesitation or reserve. There’s obviously some middle point (fairly broad) where using a particular pronunciation might make listeners double-take to some degree, or peg the speaker as being from a particular region/class/community (with whatever judgement that might entail). But judgement goes the other way too, with the person using the original pronunciation sliding from unremarkable to speaking “properly” to slightly old-fashioned to dated and irrelevant. As there isn’t a national committee for these things, it is as you say evolutionary. And as with evolution, not every change will become permanent - “hyperbowl” doesn’t seem to have made the jump, but “mischeivous” I think has or at least is well on the way. One factor is that people do get corrected, but another one might be the extent to which people hear a standard pronunciation - teh rise of mainstream media did a huge amount to set standards of pronunciation, and its current demise may well see an increase in divergent pronunciations. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2025, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/213 "2025-06-09T20:23:33Z")
> [@redpoint5](#): > > I was raised to pronounce the word ‘niche’ as nichea… but recently all examples I hear are nitch. “Neesh” is the most common pronunciation. But Nich is okay also. > [@Alessan](#): > > And I’ve always pronounced it Neesh. Not wrong. ---
**Author:** ![Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/earl_snake-hips_tucker/32/3269_2.png) [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2025, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/214 "2025-06-09T20:49:41Z")
Actually that’s completely backwards. “Nitch” is the older pronunciation, and “neesh” is the Johnny-come-lately. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2025, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/215 "2025-06-09T20:57:58Z")
Y’all just spelling it wrong. It’s ‘Nietzsche’. ---
**Author:** ![Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/q.q.switcheroo/32/5713_2.png) [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.Q.Switcheroo)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2025, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/216 "2025-06-09T21:10:42Z")
Nietzsche was peachy, but Sartre was smartre. ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2025, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/217 "2025-06-09T21:19:03Z")
> [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](#): > > “Nitch” is the older pronunciation, and “neesh” is the Johnny-come-lately. So, the latter is a niche pronunciation? 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2025, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/218 "2025-06-09T23:12:29Z")
That is not indicative of which is more common today. New pronunciations can take over very quickly. However, M-W says nich is more common. ---
**Author:** ![needscoffee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/needscoffee/32/1076_2.png) [@needscoffee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/needscoffee)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2025, 12:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/219 "2025-06-10T00:27:01Z")
> [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](#): > > “Nitch” is the older pronunciation, and “neesh” is the Johnny-come-lately. I learned to pronounce it as it’s pronounced in French, as it’s a French word. Same with foyer. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [June 10, 2025, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111/220 "2025-06-10T00:31:51Z")
For some reason “neesh” sounds okay to me, but “foy-yay” sounds grating. I learned in French too. I guess around here both nitch and neesh are common enough, but foy-yer is by far the preferred pronunciation. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111.md?page=10) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-decides-proper-pronunciation/1019111.md?page=12)