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Vice President Kamala Harris and a pop star Chappell Roan were among the most talked about people of the year. But many mispronounced them.
Language learning company Babbel and captioning company The Captioning Group have released a list of the words that news anchors, politicians and other public figures in America struggled with the most in 2024.
“It’s a nice way to kind of look back on the year and see everything that happened,” said Esteban Touma, language and culture specialist at Babbel.
Roan — whose hits include “Good Luck, Baby!” — rose to fame this year and was nominated for six Grammy Awards. According to the list, her name is pronounced CHAP-uhl ROHN, not SHA-pel ROW-an.
During Harris’ unsuccessful run for president this year, her great-nieces took the stage at the Democratic National Convention to clarify the pronunciation of her name, which is pronounced COM-a-la. Also on the list was US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, whose last name still leaves people speechless. During his 2020 presidential campaign, his campaign created posters and T-shirts saying “Boot-Edge-Edge” to help him.
Other words on the list include:
- The Dutch Kooikerhondje, pronounced COY-ker-HUND-che, is a dog breed that entered the lexicon this year. That’s mainly because Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani has a Kooikerhondje aka Decoy who won the hearts of fans as he threw out the ceremonial first pitch.
- Actress name Zendayawho starred in “The Challengers,” is often mispronounced zen-DIE-uh but should be zen-DAY.
- Online fast fashion giant Shein is SHE’s, not SHEEN’s.
- The newly discovered exoplanet Speculoos-3b is pronounced SPEK-yuh-lohss three bee.
- Phryge, the mascot of the Paris Olympics, is pronounced FREE. It was a nod to the Phrygian cap, the emblematic accessory of the French revolutionaries.
- Semaglutide, the drug in the weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, is pronounced sem-ah-GLOO-tide, not SEE-mah-gloo-tide.
- Last name of an Irish actor Barry Keoghanwho starred in “Saltburn”, pronounced key-OH-gin.
Nancy Niedzielski, chair of the linguistics department at Rice University in Houston, points out that most of the words on the list are not English, so it’s not surprising that they would be mispronounced in the US. The key to getting them right, she said, was probably just hearing them speak, she said.
“There are no real tricks other than knowing how orthology works in that language,” she said.
Several words on the US list, including Keoghan, Phryge and Shein, also made the UK list, compiled by Babbel with help from the British Institute of Verbatim Reporters, an organization for captioning professionals.
Other words on the UK list include flygskam, a Swedish term pronounced FLEEG-skam popularized by climate activist Greta Thunberg, which translates as “shame on flight”, and Chagos Islandspronounced CHAY-goss, which made the list after the British government this year returned sovereignty over the long-disputed Indian Ocean archipelago to Mauritius.
Touma, a native Spanish speaker, said if you can’t pronounce a word, it’s important to just keep trying.
“One of the problems we have is that our mouths are not trained to say these sounds that come from different languages,” he said.
Touma admitted that even he struggles with some words, including Harris’ name. Although he knows the correct pronunciation, he said, it is difficult to get it right in the moment of conversation.
As Roan’s music gained popularity over the year, it was an interesting cultural moment to watch as people learned to pronounce her first and last name, he said.
“The way we create understanding with each other is just trying to do these things,” Touma said.