'Sooni' versus Sunni

A case of linguistic power politics?
 
Does it matter if foreigners mis-pronounce Arabic names? The question was raised in a post on Facebook yesterday by Jonathan Wright, who spent many years working as a journalist in the Middle East and who has translated a dozen books from Arabic to English.

While listening to the radio, Wright was irritated to hear an American terrorism expert talking about "Sooni" Muslims. 

"Am I being unfair when I tend to discount the views of 'experts' who use weird pronunciations of simple words relevant to their work?" he asked.

Wright went on to grumble about others who refer to President Asad with a stress on last syllable of his name:

"Doesn't this mean they are bad listeners or that they are talking to the wrong people? I mean, if you're posing as an 'expert' on Syria, say, wouldn't you ask someone where the stress was in Asad, so that you could talk about him confidently in public. Otherwise it comes across as deliberate contempt for your subject matter."

My own reaction to this is much the same as Wright's. If I hear someone talking about Soonis rather than Sunnis I tend to switch off, assuming they either know little about the subject or are deliberately mis-pronouncing the word for some reason. It's the same when I hear Ay-rabs, Eye-rack or Catarrh (the country that brought us al-Jazeera).

Equally, though, it's possible to go too far in the opposite direction. Talking about Sa'oudis rather than Saudis can sound pretentious or pedantic unless you happen to be among a bunch of Arabists, and doubling the pronunciation of the "n" in "Sunni" (as Arabs do) seems unnecessarily pernickety. We can probably also excuse "Bar-ain" since English speakers have difficulty with the "h" in the middle.

We have to make some allowances in pronunciation because there are sounds in Arabic that don't exist in English (and vice versa) – so there is always going to be a degree of compromise. 

One way of approaching this is to take the word as it is normally written in English and consider how an English speaker would naturally pronounce it. Thus we call the capital of France "Paris" even though the French say "Paree". Egyptians, incidentally, say "Bearees" because they find it hard to pronounce the letter "p". 

Similarly, native speakers of some languages (though not English) might have also an excuse for stressing the wrong syllable in the Syrian president's name. For example, in a comment on Wright's Facebook post, Barbara Skubic 
says:

"When I speak Slovenian I stress 'Asad' on the last syllable, because that's what we do. And of course, no person outside the world of southern Slavia has ever pronounced my name right, so there."

Mis-pronunciation happens and a lot of the time it's nothing to bother about unduly, though Wright suggests that as a matter of basic courtesy people should make an effort: "I always try to pronounce peoples' names as well as I can without too much strain".

There is no obvious excuse, though, for English speakers to say "Sooni" when they mean "Sunni". The normal English spelling with a double "n" indicates a short "u" (which is how Arabs would pronounce it). So why the "oo" sound? Is it laziness, lack of effort, or what?

Wright's observation about courtesy may be relevant here. While some people take pride in trying to pronounce foreign names as accurately as possible, there are others who seem to make a point of distorting the pronunciation – which another commenter on Facebook interprets as a possible sign of "subconscious contempt".

Among some people at least, there does seem to be a kind of linguistic nationalism at work. It's as if they feel their language is about to be swamped by an influx of foreign words and the way to maintain control – if foreign words have to be used at all – is to pronounce them in whatever way they choose so long as it's not the way the foreigners pronounce them.