Hello everyone,

In my last post I mentioned the actual physical exercise that acceptable pronunciation requires. Today I will touch on something close to that: the way we pronounce English words in everyday Spanish. Why? Because it influences our pronunciation of those very words when we speak English.

Spain has a long, sad tradition of mispronouncing foreing terms. I’m fully aware that we are not alone in this respect but our particular situation is truly embarrassing. In the days where our country had no direct contact with the English-speaking world it may have been understandable to hear atrocious pronunciations of popular names like John Wayne. By the time Tom Cruise became a household name we were not that isolated. Still, nobody knew how to pronounce that surname and those of us who did were inevitably mocked. We then joined the Erasmus program, embraced the Internet and welcomed the launch of digital television. All of a sudden real English was just a click away and I figured everything would go back to “normal”. Boy was I wrong!

In 2017 we still say U2 in Spanish [u:dos]. We’re probably the only country in the world that can’t say Spiderman right. The word meme (coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976) reached Spain in 2015 (in its “media” meaning) and, of course, it was pronounced [meme] pretty much like “memez”, but without the final interdental. Incidentally the English word sounds [mi:m], not exactly a challenge for a Spaniard. I’ve had many conversations about this topic and, quite typically, someone will always mention that we can pronounce a loanword in any way we choose to because, technically, the moment we borrow a term it is not foreign anymore. Even if they have a point I still believe that our pronunciation of Spiderman is just laughable but, okay, fair enough.

The troubling thing about this widespread approach to foreign words, however, is that it somehow bleeds into the English that students use in the classroom. Not only that, many Spanish people roll their eyes or make snide remarks whenever somebody dares to pronounce an English loanword in a way that, even using Spanish phonemes, attempts to reproduce its original sound. In my experience reality seems to be a faraway thing that belongs to native speakers and pretentious Spaniards. Therefore “regular people” resort to a kind of “fantasy English” in which Reebok rhymes with book, Gmail is read in Spanish but Hotmail is not, socialite is not even perceived as an English word and is often pronounced in French and LinkedIn becomes simply impossible for an English speaker to recognize. As a result of all this mess, time and again we, teachers, have to explain how to pronounce basic words like wi-fi or vintage to wide-eyed students who have never heard “the real thing”.

This article published on El País just last Monday, tackles exactly this problem. Is this depressing state of affairs going to change in the foreseable future? I’m afraid not. Only a couple of days ago a very young TV host made Yosemite rhyme with might.