Rep. Lesko pronounced the name, well, as you\u2019d expect according to English pronunciation rules:\u00a0 JAY (like bluejay) \u2013 uh \u2013 pal.\u00a0 Apparently it is actually pronounced JYE (like bye) \u2013 uh \u2013 pal.<\/p>\n
And NBC continues by telling us that failure to pronounced names correctly is racist.<\/p>\n
While mispronunciations can happen, Twitter users have pointed out that Lesko\u2019s error was directed toward a colleague. Given their professional relationship, proper pronunciation is expected, if not required, and many people of color said that they found the moment all too familiar and that they respected Jayapal\u2019s decision to speak up.<\/p>\n
Experts said mispronouncing a name can be a form of racial microaggression.<\/p>\n
Rita Kohli, a race and ethnicity scholar at the University of California, Riverside, said last month that mispronouncing names is part of moving through a diverse, multilingual world. Pronouncing a name correctly the first time can be difficult without the proper tools, but mispronunciations and Anglicization of names can suggest that the dominant culture is superior and that assimilation is the best option, she said.<\/p>\n
Catherine Ceniza Choy, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said last month that names are crucial to a person\u2019s individual, family and ethnic identity. She said the simple act of learning people\u2019s names acknowledges their history and presence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So let\u2019s start with this:<\/p>\n
Generally speaking, we expect words to be able to be sounded out according to the writing conventions of the language we\u2019re speaking.\u00a0 Yes, in English, there are words which don\u2019t conform to these norms, or which require learning of more complex conventions \u2014 that is, once we learn that the \u201cgh\u201d in the ending \u201cight\u201d is not (or no longer) pronounced, we expect to be able to sound out any word with this ending in a consistent manner.\u00a0 We also have become accustomed to loanwords pronounced according to their language of origin, and we know that the \u201ct\u201d is silent in \u201cballet\u201d and \u201cbuffet,\u201d the ending \u201ce\u201d is pronounced in \u201ccaf\u00e9\u201d (regardless of whether your writing software automatically adds an accent mark), and \u201cfaux\u201d is pronounced entirely differently than English rules would suggest.<\/p>\n
Names, too, when they become common enough, we learn to pronounce according to the pronunciation rules of their languages of origin, at least more or less, taking into account the differences in sounds available to us:\u00a0 we use a \u201csh\u201d sound in \u201cSean\u201d and a \u201cw\u201d in Juan.<\/p>\n
But this new set of demands goes further.<\/p>\n
No one has a right to move to a country in which their name is not in ordinary use, and not a part of that country\u2019s language, and yet demand that their name be pronounced according to the norms of their own native language.\u00a0 That\u2019s true the first time, and that\u2019s true the tenth time, especially in instances in which the name is difficult to pronounce (or remember the pronunciation of) or uses sounds which are not a part of the English language.\u00a0 That\u2019s true for names which have their origins in other European languages with different pronunciation systems and that\u2019s all the more true for names originally spelled in non-Latin alphabets, in which the transliteration into the Latin alphabet may follow a wholly different pronunciation rules.\u00a0 (After all, in grad school, my roommate\u2019s name was transliterated from Chinese as Qi-Qing, which she advised me was pronounced \u201cChi-Ching\u201d; she now goes by the name \u201cChristine\u201d professionally.\u00a0 There is no reasonable way to demand that an American should intuit the alternate use to which the Chinese have put the Latin letter Q, or X, let alone have studied pronunciation systems of all non-English languages.)<\/p>\n
And this is not a matter of asserting that \u201cthe dominant culture is superior.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s a matter of acknowledging that the dominant culture is dominant<\/em>, and that it\u2019s the way the world works, every bit as much as it is that we expect English to be spoken in the workplace.<\/p>\nAnd, yes, I spent two years living in Germany.\u00a0 My name has a \u201cth\u201d which is a sound which doesn\u2019t exist in German, and which Germans pronounce about as poorly as we Americans would fare pronouncing a German \u201cch.\u201d\u00a0 And, no, I did not object to mispronunciations; to the contrary, it seemed terribly impolite to correct people, though perhaps it would have been different if it were a simple matter of switching out one accessible sound for another.<\/p>\n
Should Rep. Jayapal have corrected Lesko?\u00a0 Of course there\u2019s no reason not to do so in a polite manner:\u00a0 \u201cjust so you know, it\u2019s JYE like bye rather than JAY like bluejay.\u201d\u00a0 After all, I would correct misspellings of my name, when it mattered, anyway.\u00a0 But it\u2019s not a matter of bias, not to know the pronunciation of non-English words, even if they are proper names.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Image:\u00a0https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3ABilingualDictionaries.jpg; By w:User:LinguistAtLarge (English-language Wikipedia) [GFDL (http:\/\/www.gnu.org\/copyleft\/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0\/)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Featured on NBC News on Tuesday:\u00a0 \u201cRep. Jayapal asks that her name be properly pronounced after colleague gets it wrong; \u2018Jayapal. If you\u2019re going to say my name, please say it right. It\u2019s Jayapal.’\u201d You have to listen to the twitter clip, of course, to hear it: Rep. Lesko pronounced the name, well, as you\u2019d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[497],"class_list":["post-17303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-multiculturalism"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n