When only white people are around, what is the best way to pronounce Spanish words?
I’ve found [the English-French equivalent of this] to be interesting here in Montreal. I’m sort of bilingual, having learned French fairly early on as a second language, but go to a very predominantly English school, where most of my friends are Americans who speak very little French. For the most part, English-speakers in Montreal seem to settle on a happy medium, learning not to pronounce the t’s in Saint-Laurent, but, say in the French name of a business, if a word, like “restaurant” or “club” is spelled the same in English, using the English pronunciation around other native anglophones. Obviously, as an anglophone living in Quebec, I feel this to be a political issue, and it’s something that I try to pay attention to. It’s also interesting to hear how badly someone with very little knowledge of French can screw up pronunciations (“Wow, who knew you didn’t have to pronounce all those letters in there?
There are probably a couple of flavours of foreign words. Some have been taken and anglicized, usually to sell products. I would not be surprised if everything at Taco Bell is mispronounced. For other words I do my best to get the pronunciation right. This goes for peoples names too. I work with a Joel, he’s from Mexico, early on his wife referred to him as Ho-el so that’s what I call him. Almost nobody else does though which seems odd and disrespectful. I still probably pronounce things incorrectly, but I try.
Huh, I’ve always called them boo-REE-toes. Maybe it’s the SoCal background. And madajb: growing up there, I definitely learned to pronounce road names somewhere between totally Anglicized & totally Spanish: because there are so many, I think people are just used to it. Though in Montreal, I always enjoyed how the Anglos I knew gave directions by the English names for roads even though the signs are in French.
Pronounciation is funny. I think a lot of it is cultural. Saying something a certain way can be making a cultural statement… I think I should be allowed to talk the way I talk instead of the way the generic TV people talk. Absolutely. Regional dialect is beautiful. New Englanders with otherwise neutral diction never pronounce “aunt” as a homonym for “ant,” and Philadelphians shouldn’t be ashamed to ask for “werter” when they want water. But someone who is a native speaker of American english shouldn’t pull an Alex Trebek and trill and aspirate the hell out of “Arc de Triumph.” It’s nearly as pretentious as americans using british terms or (shudder) accents. I should be allowed to assault you if you’re from Massachusetts and you refer to “bangers” when you mean “sausages”.
