# Why are Italian-American names so badly mispronounced, even by their owners? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 22, 2005, 12:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-italian-american-names-so-badly-mispronounced-even-by-their-owners/295660 "2005-03-22T00:49:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 170
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2022, 6:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-italian-american-names-so-badly-mispronounced-even-by-their-owners/295660/170 "2022-10-18T18:12:03Z")
Okay, as a celebrity his genealogy is pretty public. His immigrant great-grandfather was Giuseppe Fieri. It’s a little harder to track down where he’s from, but the one tree I found on Ancestry said he was from Arsago Seprio in Lombardy. If that’s the case, his pronunciation seems off, but I’m a little dubious about the source, as Fieri isn’t really a Lombard name. It seems to be from Tuscany and Lazio. I’m still inclined to think the explanation given above is correct, that he heard /fiεɾi/ and was used to only hearing /ɾ/ in words like _wedding_, and maybe was able to contrast it with full-on rolled /r/, so mis-parsed the R sound in “Fieri” as a D sound. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-italian-american-names-so-badly-mispronounced-even-by-their-owners/295660)._