“Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa explained the significance of the Chicxulub impact crater to actor Domhnall Gleeson over a drink of negroni sbagliato in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia,” is the kind of sentence that just might tie your tongue up in knots.
It contains five examples from this year’s list of the most mispronounced words released Wednesday by The Captioning Group, which since 1991 has captioned and subtitled real-time events on television in the U.S. and Canada.
The Captioning Group has compiled the list since 2016 by surveying the words and names most often mangled on live television by newsreaders, politicians, public figures and others. It is commissioned by Babbel, the online language learning company based in New York and Berlin.
Yes, the list is a little humorous, but it’s also educational and highlights how some of the biggest international news events of the year have entered the North American consciousness, said Esteban Touma, a senior content producer and language teacher at Babbel.
“It really shows the ways we interact with other languages and really gives a good grasp of what’s going on in the world and how we connect with people abroad,” he said.
Don’t be intimidated by tough-to-pronounce words, he said. It is an opportunity to learn. After all, even professionals sometimes have problems.
“People want to get the right pronunciation but it’s hard to do so,” he said.
Just ask Joe Biden.
New British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was infamously referred to as “Rasheed Sanook” by the U.S. president, but he wasn’t the only one to stumble over the name, which should be pronounced REE-shee SOO-nahk.
Then there’s Grammy-winning singer Adele, who informed the world in October that her fans have for years been mispronouncing her name. It’s not “ah-DELL” but “uh-DALE.”
The other words on the list, with phonetic pronunciations provided by Babbel, were: