Why are non-Anglo names so difficult for so many Anglo-Australians to pronounce?
I’ve been pondering this all week following the eruption of “Lucygate”: the curious social media storm over SBS World Cup host Lucy Zelic’s pronunciation of ethnic names in her coverage of the global soccer tournament in Russia.
Zelic has earned the ire of some disgruntled viewers for daring to pronounce all these Cuadrados and Bereszynskis and Finnbogasons correctly – as in the way they’re said by their respective mamas back home - in a tribute to the late soccer legend Les Murray, a stickler for native pronunciation.
The temerity!
To my mind, this Zelic-bashing is all a bit rich, really. You would think we’d welcome a guide to correct pronunciation given our habit of mangling any surname that deviates even slightly from the Anglo-Celtic norm.
It has long been an enduring mystery to me, this phenomenon, and why it persists even with our long multicultural history and enthusiastic travelling culture.
Faced with the simplest of non-Anglo names – Mohammed, say, or Singh – a large swathe of Aussies suddenly get sweaty, stuttery and struck by stage fright. It’s as if they’ve been asked to sing in Sanskrit or translate hieroglyphics. Tran? Naidu? Cue mumbling and mutilations.
We cannot even correctly pronounce the capitals of our Asian neighbours, it seems. I cringe every time I hear my hometown Kuala Lumpur being transmogrified into a strange beast of a thing called Koala Lump-ah
Over the years, I’ve witnessed the full gamut. The so-called ‘arrogant manglers’ who insist on their own wildly creative interpretations of your name despite repeated correction. The shameless nicknamers, who, when told your name is Shanti, instantly respond with “ooh, that’s tricky, we’ll just call you Sarah.” And finally, the Whatevers – those merry slackers who start saying your name before giving up with an airy wave of dismissal.
We cannot even correctly pronounce the capitals of our Asian neighbours, it seems. I cringe every time I hear my hometown Kuala Lumpur being transmogrified into a strange beast of a thing called Koala Lump-ah. I’m looking at you, national broadcaster ABC.
But how difficult is it really to pronounce a two or even three-syllable name? Surely your garden-variety Sanjay or Sharmini isn’t as tricky as, say, Niamh, or Hermione?
Here, I think of Orange is the New Black actress Uzo Aduba, whose name means “the road is good” in her Igbo Nigerian culture, and who once asked her mother if she could be called Zoe instead to make it easier for people to say her name.
Her mother’s response? “Why? If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.”
Quite. As Jennifer Gonzalez, a former teacher and author of the education blog Cult of Pedagogy, says, “it’s only difficult because it’s culturally different.”
Names hold power. Names represent culture and family history. For Australia’s multicultural communities, in particular, they provide a symbolic link to homelands
So why should it matter? Why not mumble, mangle and mutilate your way through the phonebook of life?
Because names matter. Names hold power. Names represent culture and family history. For Australia’s multicultural communities, in particular, they provide a symbolic link to homelands. As perhaps the most important identifier of a person, they shape everything from social status to employment outcomes.
Migrants lose a crucial piece of their identity and agency when they dumb down or anglicise names in what H. L. Mencken described as far back as 1919 as a form of “protective colouration” to escape social enmity targeting newcomers.
For me, it all comes down to basic courtesy and respect.
Not taking the time to learn names falls into a larger category of behaviours called microaggressions, defined by researchers at Columbia University’s Teachers College as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioural, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of colour.”
Jennifer Gonzalez agrees it is a “tiny act of bigotry… Whether you intend to or not, what you’re communicating is this: Your name is different. Foreign. Weird. It’s not worth my time to get it right.”
For Zelic, respect is the key message. And unwittingly or not, she’s part of a growing movement advocating the importance of correct pronunciation with initiatives ranging from a national education campaign in Californian schools called “My Name, My Identity” to Hearnames.com, a website that shows you how to pronounce ethnic names from over 34 languages.
Les Murray would have approved.
And note to Aunty and the rest of our broadcasters. Kuala Lumpur is pronounced Ku-Wa-La Loom–Puh. Try it. It’s easy.
