There are over six thousand languages spoken around the world, with endless dialects and accents. This makes it understandable that we all mispronounce words from time to time. But according to WordTips, there are some names that are a bit more challenging than most.
In June, WordTips, a word game site, shared its study on the most mispronounced words, including consumer brands, names of musicians, movie stars, athletes, and cities around the world.
To find the most mispronounced words, WordTips turned to the largest pronunciation dictionary in the world, Forvo.com, which uses sound clips offered in various different languages to help people learn the correct pronunciation of words.
To find the most mispronounced city in each country, WordTips looked for cities with a population of over 100,000. After compiling a list of cities, the team checked how many times each place had been heard to learn the correct pronunciation.
With 7,000,000 listeners on Forvo, the team found that Rio de Janeiro was the most difficult city name to pronounce in the world.
“Ranking first with an impressive seven million listeners was Rio de Janeiro (Ree-oh dey zhuh-nair-oh),” the company noted. “As Portuguese is a notoriously tricky language to get right, especially since pronunciation varies across different regions of Brazil, it’s no wonder so many people have needed help along the way.”
The top ten list includes Tokyo with over four million listeners, Chicago and Dublin tied with 1.8 million listeners, London and Edinburgh with 1.7 million each, Buenos Aires with 1.5 million, Melbourne with 1.3 million, Medellín with 841,000, and Barcelona with 805,000.
“Just like learning a language, the trick to mastering the correct pronunciation of city names is to decipher each syllable,” WordTips added as a hot tip. “Sarajevo is a place that catches the attention of many English speakers, as the J is softly pronounced ‘sa·ruh·yay·vow’, while Chicago (shuh·kaa·gow) can confuse some non-natives, as ‘Ch’ is pronounced like ‘Sh.’”
Need help pronouncing a word? Find the complete list of mispronounced words here: https://word.tips/most-mispronounced-words/ and a little help at https://forvo.com
Source: Travel+ Leisure