I have it on good authority that 'Athens' is now pronounced like the capital of Greece, and that 'Coxsackie' is pronounced more or less as spelled: 'cock-SACK-ee'.

'Upstate Pennsylvania' is not unheard of, but as a native Philadelphian I've never been clear on the boundary.

Posted by: komfo,amonan at September 11, 2007 09:12 PM

"Upstate Vermont" and "Upstate New Hampshire" are permissible, I think (or perhaps I'm confused by eleven years in New York), but the northeast corner of Vermont is more commonly known as the "Northeast Kingdom". I'm not sure why. I understand Maine to have an east/west contrast instead, as designated by "backwoods". No "downstate" or "frontwoods", though.

Posted by: SnowLeopard at September 11, 2007 09:36 PM

I've heard of "Upstate Pennsylania" but I have never been able to figure out where it is, in that I could not name a single town that is in it. The only thing that's clear to me (a native Philadelphian) is that Philadelphia is not in it.

Apparently "the Upstate" is used to describe northwestern South Carolina, which makes sense because this is the part of the state at the highest altitude. (A question -- does the "up" in "upstate" denote northerliness or high elevation? In New York State these sort-of-coincide but they don't everywhere.

Posted by: Isabel at September 11, 2007 09:37 PM

@Isabel: I always took the "up" in "upstate New York" to be the opposite of the "down" in "downtown." I don't know if that was the intent, though.

Posted by: Ran at September 11, 2007 10:09 PM

In Maine, there's The County, Down East and everywhere else. Can't say I've heard Backwoods before.

I'd certainly love such a list of names for Mass, though; does anyone outside the state pronounce Amherst, Billerica, Rehoboth and Woburn correctly?

Posted by: cure at September 11, 2007 10:13 PM

You'll be happy to know that Cairo is still KAY-row. I went through on a Trailways bus over Labor Day and the busdriver announced the stop using the traditional pronunciation.

Bot the Shawangunks ans Schunemunk are hiking destinations. The trail guides all explain the SHONG-gum pronunciation, but they are silent about Schunemunk.

Posted by: Gary at September 11, 2007 10:13 PM

I find these pronunciations fascinating, too, as I grew up surrounded by a whole bunch of strange place names, in Southern Illinois (really all over the state). For instance, we, too, have a Cairo (KAY-roh), as well as Vienna (VYE-a-nuh), New Berlin (New BUR-lin), Athens (AY-thens). Further upstate there's Marseilles (Mar-SALES), La Grange (luh-GRAYNGE), Mahomet (MAY-o-met).

Posted by: Fr Chris at September 11, 2007 10:45 PM

Here in Baltimore, we pronounce Thames Street "Thaymes," with a soft "th." It's how you tell the locals from the newcomers. Nearby is Aliceanna Street, which, when I first moved to town, I mistakenly pronounced "A-LEES-ee-AH-na." It is, of course, pronounced "Alice-Anna." Duh!

Back home in Washington State, there's the town Sequim (pronounced "Skwim") and also Puyallup (which often gets transposed to "Pyoo-allup"), but I don't think we've ever had a scifi author document such stuff.

Posted by: shutupproust at September 11, 2007 10:52 PM

"Upstate" also seems to be used in South Carolina.

Note: I believe climbers refer to the Shawangunks as "the Gunks."

One sf writer, George R. Stewart, is probably better known as a dialectitian who wrote about place names.

Posted by: Dan Goodman at September 11, 2007 10:53 PM

Oh, and in terms of place-names, Vermont has Barre (BARE-ee) and Montpelier (Ma~'-PILL-yer), with ~ representing nasalization and ' representing the glottal stop frequently substituted for t's in the local accent. There's also Calais (pronounced "callous", without irony). I was once told that New Hampshire's Berlin changed its pronunciation to BURR-lin during WWII to distinguish itself from the German namesake. Vermont's Berlin, though, is still pronounced "burr-LIN".

Posted by: SnowLeopard at September 12, 2007 12:07 AM

Apparently "Callous" is the traditional English pronunciation; after all, the city was originally more English than French, sending representatives to the English Parliament from 1372 until 1558. So it's not too surprising that the Vermont city (founded 1781) is pronounced that way too.

Posted by: John Cowan at September 12, 2007 12:53 AM

vər-SAYLZ also applies to Versailles Township, Allegheny County, PA

I believe all or nearly all British names are Americanized in CT (Green-wich, Thaymes, etc.) but left British in MA.

Posted by: Charles at September 12, 2007 02:53 AM

British people who don't speak French still habitually refer to Rheims as Reemz.

Posted by: Paul at September 12, 2007 03:53 AM

Right near RYE-gah is BURR-jinn (Bergen). And just south, is A~vawn (Avon). (The ~ is a flat, short A ending in a nasal sound before V)

Posted by: David at September 12, 2007 04:38 AM

There's been lots of discussion of the meaning/use of 'upstate' on the American Dialect Society list over the years (at least once or twice starting with me saying to someone from south of Albany that they aren't TRUE Upstaters! and then people from other states talking about it--if I recall correctly)...a glance at their archives might be informative:

http://www.americandialect.org/

Right near Chili (suburb of Rochester) is another one that catches people off-guard: Charlotte (shar-LOT).

Posted by: lynneguist at September 12, 2007 05:03 AM

Add to your list "BEE-you-na VIS-ta" (Buena Vista -- I don't know how it got a Spanish name), Virginia, LYE-ma, Ohio, and val-pa-RAY-zo, Indiana. Not to mention HOW-stun (Houston) Street in New York City. In Jackson, Miss, there's a street named Amite (I'm not sure whether there's supposed to be an accent over the "e") and pronounced "uh-MITT". Thames Street in Newport, RI, has a hard "th" and rhymes with "names", Washington's Northern Virginia suburbs have a McLean pronounced "McLANE." Granted, it's a variant that antedates the place, but it's also a shibboleth -- tourists almost invariably call it McLeen (and whatever happened to that sandwich, anyway?) I'm sure there are many more.

Posted by: Bob L. at September 12, 2007 08:14 AM

Also, Ovid is OH-vid rather than AH-vid, but I guess that's just the usual pronunciation.

Posted by: MattF at September 12, 2007 08:29 AM

Note: I believe climbers refer to the Shawangunks as "the Gunks."

I know—I used to hang out with one of them. I tried not to get too irritated, because there's no reason for outsiders to know the local pronunciation, and "Gunks" is a perfectly natural shortening, but it did grate on me a little.

I have it on good authority that 'Athens' is now pronounced like the capital of Greece, and that 'Coxsackie' is pronounced more or less as spelled: 'cock-SACK-ee'.

Sigh. I was afraid of that. Why can't people hang on to their quaint folkways?

Lynneguist: I went to the ADL site, but didn't see a search function.

Posted by: language hat at September 12, 2007 08:31 AM

Our son, on his first trip alone out of Rochester, called from an airport layover.... "Hi, Mom, I'm in shar-LOTT!" "What are you doing here, you're supposed to be on your way to Florida! ... OH! SHAR-lot!"

Posted by: David at September 12, 2007 10:05 AM

Would any of you Pennsylvanians care to comment on the pronunciation of Wilkes-Barre?

Posted by: Paul Clapham at September 12, 2007 11:28 AM

The Chillowacks are another climbers' destination. Patagonia is still another.

Posted by: Jhn Emrsn at September 12, 2007 12:49 PM

Ohio is a good one for local pronunciations of towns named after famous foreign cities. In addition to its own Meh-DYE-na and of course To-LEE-do (instead of To-LAY-do) and the aforementioned LYE-ma, there's CAE-dihs (instead of Ca-DIS), Caen-'un (Canton, which, I guess doesn't really count since that's actually Guang-dong) and they simply get lazy when confronted with Toronto (which comes out sort of like Torano) and Burgholz (Burgles). Funny enough, most people who would even have the occasion to say Gnadenhutten probably speak more German than English and so generally pronounce it fairly close to the original.

Posted by: ideomorph at September 12, 2007 12:50 PM

If Bob L. means Buena Vista, Colorado, that town was named in "developer Spanish," which is contrasted to actual Spanish. Actual Spanish place names in Colorado are either religious (Trinidad "Trinity")
or baldly descriptive (Las Sauces "The Willows). Developer-Spanish names are pseudo-poetic or scenic, like BV.

Locally, it's "Boonie" or "Byoonie."

On the main post, my wife did her freshman year of college at SUNY-Delhi, and every time she says the name I see it mentally as "Delhigh" or something like that.

Posted by: Chas S. Clifton at September 12, 2007 01:05 PM

I can remember when Vienna, Virginia, and Vienna sausages used to be pronounced VYE-enna. I don't know about the sausages, but all them furriners who moved into the DC burbs (including my brother) seem to have changed the normal pronunciation of the city to vee-EH-na.

There's also a BER-lin down in Southampton County, VA, not too far from Warsaw, I believe. Paris is up at the northern peak of the state.

Posted by: Joel at September 12, 2007 01:09 PM

"Back home in Washington State, there's the town Sequim (pronounced "Skwim") and also Puyallup (which often gets transposed to "Pyoo-allup"), but I don't think we've ever had a scifi author document such stuff."

"Pyoo-allup" is a shibboleth that newcomers/outsiders routinely screw up.

What is worth some study is how this or that river name came into English with the -b- or the -m-
Why do we have "Duwamis`" (

Posted by: Jim at September 12, 2007 02:11 PM

Wilkes-Barre is pronounced "WOOKS-bear-ee" (rhymes with books berry).

Posted by: Ben M at September 12, 2007 02:28 PM

In Berlin, oddly enough, when German-speakers speak English they pronounce the name of the city 'BUR-lin'. Maybe they have been spending time in New Hampshire?

Posted by: Helen DeWitt at September 12, 2007 02:33 PM

British people who don't speak French still habitually refer to Rheims as Reemz.
French people habitually spell it Reims

Posted by: mollymooly at September 12, 2007 02:52 PM

In Berlin, oddly enough, when German-speakers speak English they pronounce the name of the city 'BUR-lin'.

Really! How very odd. Hypercorrection, maybe?

Posted by: language hat at September 12, 2007 03:26 PM

Vienna, WV used to be pronounced VYE-en-uh. More recently it is said VEE-en-uh, which, I suppose, says something for the spread of literacy along the Ohio River.

J. Del Col

Posted by: J. Del Col at September 12, 2007 07:21 PM

@Chas S. Clifton: You seem to know about Colorado place-names; I don't suppose you'd know why a street in Colorado Springs would be called "Cache la Poudre" (French for "hide the powder")? When I lived there I could never understand it, but for some reason I never looked into it.

Posted by: Ran at September 12, 2007 10:25 PM

In Massachusetts, Worcester is pronounced Wuss-tah, as in: I'm gonna Wuss-tah to pick up a toast-ah.

In NYC, Houston Street is pronounced Hows-ton Street. And Athol Mass. sounds very similar to how "asshole" sounds with a Boston accent.

You haven't lived till you've gone to the poolhall in Athol Mass. and heard "Dueling Banjos" played half a dozen times a night on the jukebox.

People from New Hampshire refer to Massachusetts residents as Massholes. FWIW.

Posted by: madame l. at September 13, 2007 01:28 AM

And closer to home, of course you know that Amherst is pronounced without the "h" -- AM-erst.
I'm from upstate NY (truly upstate -- Schenectady), and it seems to me that I say CO-sack -- ee, but maybe my memory is failing...

Posted by: mab at September 13, 2007 05:03 AM

you know that Amherst is pronounced without the "h" -- AM-erst.

Yeah, the saying is that Amherst stole Northampton's second h.

Posted by: language hat at September 13, 2007 08:18 AM

Here in Michigan, we have the "U-P", short for "Upper Penninsula". We don't call the lower penninsula the "L-P" though.
We have our share of local pronounciations of towns named after more famous counterparts:

Pompeii is pronounced "POM-pee-eye"
Milan is "MY-lin"
Delhi is "DELL-high"
and we've also got:
Saline= "suh-LEEN"
Monroe= "MAHN-roh" and my favorite,
Sault Ste. Marie= "soo saint mar-EE".

Posted by: Jenny at September 13, 2007 09:22 AM

The Houston Streets in NYC and Atlanta are named after John Houstoun (1744-1796), member of the Continental Congress and two-time Governor of Georgia, and reflect his own pronunciation. I don't know what happened to the second "u"; lost in the course of time, probably. (On the other hand, the omission of the second "e" from Waverly Place was apparently deliberate and contemporary with the renaming of the street after Scott's Waverley.) Houston County in central Georgia also preserves Houstoun's pronunciation.

How [houst@n] came to be Houstoun's pronunciation is a question: he was born in America to Scottish immigrants who presumably pronounced their name [hustun] or [hust@n].

Posted by: John Cowan at September 13, 2007 10:26 AM

"Cache la Poudre" probably means "powder cache," a place where gunpowder was stored, but French also has "magasin" for that.

J. Del Col

Posted by: j. del col at September 13, 2007 11:57 AM

Ran: "@Chas S. Clifton: You seem to know about Colorado place-names; I don't suppose you'd know why a street in Colorado Springs would be called "Cache la Poudre" (French for "hide the powder")? When I lived there I could never understand it, but for some reason I never looked into it."

While I'm not Mr. Clifton, I'm willing to speculate on this one. First, you need to know that there were French trappers in this part of the country up until the early 19th centuries. These trappers presumably cached their supplies at the highest point accessible by boat in many cases.

Second, and perhaps more important, there is a river that runs through Laporte (note the additional French-derived name) and Ft. Collins, CO that is also named the Cache la Poudre (and usually just called the "POO-der").

I don't know whether the street name comes directly from a historical cache local to the street or from the river further north, though.

Posted by: Doug Sundseth at September 13, 2007 12:56 PM

Doug Sundseth pretty well said it.

General William Palmer's company, which laid out Colorado Springs, named many streets after creeks and rivers, hence Cache la Poudre Street. In Colorado Springs, it is pronounced "Poo - drah" but in Fort Collins, it's "Poo - der."

The name came from an early 19th-century incident when some French Canadian trappers cached supplies along the stream, or at least that's the official story.

Colorado Springs also has a Willamette Street, which is not pronounced as it is in Portand, Oregon.

Having lived in all those places, I have to think carefully before speaking.

Posted by: Chas S. Clifton at September 13, 2007 02:36 PM

dorSET Street in Dublin is traditionally stressed on the second syllable, unlike the English county it's named after. However, lately I hear people (e.g. radio traffic reporters) saying DORset Street. Thing is, the street is in the (working-class) Northside, while the DORset-sayers have Southside (middle-class) accents. So, are they correcting the Northsiders' ignorance, or displaying their own?

Newcastle-upon-Tyne in Northeast England is locally newCAStle, but Londoners have generally pronounced it NEWcastle. There seems to be some move towards recognizing the local form among BBC football presenters. For further discussion of whether local is better, consider newfoundLAND vs newFOUNDland

Posted by: mollymooly at September 13, 2007 07:29 PM

It boggles the mind...

Really! How very odd. Hypercorrection, maybe?

Ckearly so. English is oddly willing to stress even rather recent French loans on the first or anyway not the last syllable; that isn't done in German, where initial stress is restricted to native words (of which Berlin, BTW, isn't one).

(I'm too tired to figure out if that's an invalid overgeneralization, but it should hold most of the time.)

Posted by: David Marjanović at September 13, 2007 07:31 PM

newfoundLAND???

Posted by: David Marjanović at September 13, 2007 07:35 PM

I should have mentioned how difficult it is to teach native German speakers to stress "hotel" on the last syllable. That's how it's done in German, and everyone knows (I think) that that's also how it's done in the original French -- but to carry that over into English makes the result sound not English, and we already know that English speakers mercilessly pronounce everything as if it were English (which is not consciously done in German).

Is it true that (Charles) Lyell, one of the founders of geology, is stressed on his last syllable, too? I've heard at least one American professor of geology consistently pronouncing him that way, and I remember thinking "What? He isn't French!" all the time.

Posted by: David Marjanović at September 13, 2007 07:41 PM

British people who don't speak French still habitually refer to Rheims as Reemz.
- French people habitually spell it Reims.

The city is indeed Reims in French and Rheims in English. I suppose that the h was added at a time when it was fashionable in both languages to complicate the spelling, probably under the influence of the river names le Rhône and le Rhin (the Rhine).

Reims, where the kings of France used to be crowned, was a very well-known and important city centuries ago. As with many words borrowed from Old French, the English pronunciation preserves in part the OF pronunciation, which must have been [reymz], before English changed its [ey] sound to [ee]. On the other hand, the French name is now pronounced exactly as in rince (a form of the verb meaning "to rinse").

As for Calais pronounced like "callous", the final s was pronounced in French at the time also. English speakers stressed the word on the first rather than the final syllable and reduced the unstressed vowel, just as they still do now. This would be true whether the Vermont Calais was settled by French or English people originally - English speakers were familiar with the name in its English pronunciation, just as French people are familiar with Londres as the French name of London.

I should add that I see nothing wrong with continuing to use a pronunciation of foreign names that is established in one's own language, rather than trying to ape the foreign pronunciation, especially if one is not familiar with the language. I would much rather hear "PARE-iS" than "Puh-REE" from an English speaker.

In America there is also New Orleans pronounced as New OR-linnz, a translation of La Nouvelle-Orléans, the latter a word of three syllables: OR-LÉ-ANs, the name of a French city where Joan of Arc (Jeanne d'Arc) won a decisive victory over the English occupiers.

Washington's Northern Virginia suburbs have a McLean pronounced "McLANE."

Here in Nova Scotia there are lots of people of Scottish origin and McLean is always pronounced "McLANE", never "McLEEN". This is also the pronunciation of the Canadian news magazine "Mclean's".

Sault Ste. Marie= "soo saint mar-EE":

This is the way the name is pronounced in Canadian English as well, on the other side of the river and border, as an adaptation of the French pronunciation. Locally the place is called "The Soo", a half-translation of the French le saut meaning "the jump" (of the waters, i.e. "the falls"). So the meaning is 'St Mary's Falls'.

I guess that English speakers learned that sault was not pronounced with an l as in assault, nor did it sound like the word saw as said in North America, so the French vowel was approximated as [oo].

"Cache la Poudre" probably means "powder cache," a place where gunpowder was stored, but French also has "magasin" for that.

I agree with the translation here (although the expression seems to come from a simplified form of French), but la cache and le magasin are not quite the same. A cache could store anything one wants hidden from predators (human or animal), and it could be improvised on the spot, for instance by the French trappers who "presumably cached their supplies at the highest point accessible by boat". A magasin for gunpowder would be specially built or at least dedicated to the purpose, as part of a military installation. It is possible that the name Cache la poudre refers to such an installation, since the trappers etc might not have known the specific military terminology, nor have a need to store enormous amounts of gunpowder themselves.

(In Washington State) What is worth some study is how this or that river name came into English with the -b- or the -m-
Why do we have "Duwamis`" ?

It is because of the variation in the local native languages. Lots of place names in Washington and British Columbia end in -mis(h), but in some of the languages where the names come from, the sounds m and n have been replaced in all words by b and d respectively. For instance, in B.C. there is the language known as Nitinat, which is called Ditidaht by the people who speak it. It is because of this overall change in some of the languages that place names originating in those languages end in -bis(h) rather than the more common -mis(h).

Posted by: marie-lucie at September 13, 2007 11:33 PM

I think I've also heard Pulaski NY pronounced pə-LASS-sky, but that's not really my part of the world, so I don't know if that's common. I was born in new MADrid, Missouri, but I grew up in Florida and Georgia, so I know place names like awlBANny (Albany), KAYro (Cairo), MARE-ə-etter (Marietta), and K(y)EERLT'n (Carrollton), all in Georgia, and HAYvanna (Havana) in Florida. In the Jacksonville FL area, there's a bunch of stuff named for Jean Ribault, whose name is now pronounced "Gene REEballt". He was a 16th century French explorer/colonist/Huguenot (which is pronounced "HYOO-gə-naut", of course).

I live in Western Mass now, so I'm used to CHICKəpee (Chicopee), NORTfeel (Northfield), BERnerdstən (Bernardston), and PARmer (Palmer), but no one I've asked knows how to pronounce Poquonock, CT.

Posted by: oxlahun at September 14, 2007 11:32 AM

oxlahun, yes, puh-LASS-sky is the only way to pronounce Pulaski, NY. Another upstate town name I like is Chaumont, pronounced shuh-MOE (sounds like "shmo" if you say it fast).

Posted by: Jmb at September 14, 2007 12:22 PM

Sault Ste. Marie= "soo saint mar-EE":
cf. beauty vs beauté

newfoundLAND???
According to Wikipedia:

Newfoundlanders pronounce Newfoundland to rhyme with 'understand,' placing emphasis on -LAND, not New or found-. It sounds something like "newfin-LAND." Canadians outside of the Atlantic provinces (therefore, discluding Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia as well as Newfoundland) and tourists are noted for their pronunciation of Newfoundland as "new-FOUND-lind", "NEW-fin-lind" or "NEW-found-lind."

Not sure I trust a source that uses the word "disclude", but still.

Posted by: mollymooly at September 14, 2007 07:41 PM

This article was written in 1944, and some of the pronunciations seem to have changed. Komfo,amonan is right about Coxsackie, and I have heard "Linklaen" pronounced LINK-lay-in. Syracuse, where I lived as a child, was always SAIR-a-cuse back then, and I think it still is. The "Berlin" in New Berlin and its neighbors (like "South New Berlin") is BURR-lin.

Posted by: Alan Gunn at September 14, 2007 07:41 PM

I don't know where Wikipedia got the i in various pronunciations of the land in Newfoundland. I have not been everywhere in Canada, but I have heard the name many, many times and the land part never thymed with wind (the weather term). I personally would say NEW-fun-land which seems to be the most common pronunciation. A person from Newfoundland is a New-fun-LAND-er. New-FOUND-land sounds British to me (rightly or wrongly), or at least foreign, not Canadian of any local origin.

Posted by: marie-lucie at September 14, 2007 10:42 PM

[Correction: it was actually Wikitravel, not Wikipedia.] I assume the is in "NEW-fin-lind" etc. are intended as schwas.

Posted by: mollymooly at September 15, 2007 05:59 AM

(I meant rhymed not thymed)

mollymooly: even if the i's are intended as schwas, they are incorrect - the LAND part does not have a schwa, as it is not unstressed as in the words England and Netherlands but has at least a secondary stress, preserving the vowel.

Posted by: marie-lucie at September 15, 2007 01:59 PM

marie-lucie: I guess this illustrates the limitations of adhoc respelling schemes. I'm quite happy to imagine the author faithfully representing two consecutive unstressed syllables [ˈnjuːfənlənd], while you imagine a failed attempt to represent [ˈnjuːfənˌlænd]. I guess the author would regard each as an erroneous tourist pronunciation, but which one was intended we may never know.

Posted by: mollymooly at September 15, 2007 09:31 PM

"I'm quite happy to imagine the author faithfully representing two consecutive unstressed syllables [...], while you imagine a failed attempt to represent [...land]." (Sorry, the schwas won't reproduce).

I am not imagining a failed attempt at representing a genuine pronunciation (with secondary stress on LAND), but an attempt at representing an imagined pronunciation (with this element unstressed) on the basis of words with similar morphological makeup but different stress pattern. Canadian readers, let me know if I am wrong.

Posted by: marie-lucie at September 15, 2007 11:01 PM

I can add one upstate New York place name: my grandfather's Rensselaer County birthplace, Schaghticoke, pronounced skatticook.

Posted by: Charles Perry at September 24, 2007 11:31 AM

In Haida Gwai (known to atlases as the Queen Charlotte Islands, in Canada not too far from the Alaska panhandle) one of the towns is Skidegate, pronounced SKID-igget.

Posted by: marie-lucie at September 24, 2007 01:40 PM

Just to document the use of "upstate" in South Carolina...here's the online version of the Greenville News with the headline [url=http://greenvilleonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070926/NEWS01/709260378/1011/NEWS03]Thompson adds to Upstate support[/url]

Posted by: BillM at September 26, 2007 08:30 AM