Pronouncing Non-English Names For English Speakers

A practical guide to how to pronounce non-English names for English speakers

The goal of this guide is to produce a simple guide to help you pronounce a surname from a non-English speaking culture that sounds reasonably correct. In this guide, we will provide reasonable approximations using sounds that are already familiar to English speakers.
Learning to produce non-English sounds is out of scope for this document, but lots of fun and I highly recommend it.

General

Rule #1 for pronouncing someone's name is what the person in question says the pronunciation of their name is should override this document! For example, in the US, many families that immigrated many years ago have changed the way their name was pronounced from its original heritage pronunciation. That's totally fine! Use their pronunciation!

There's an important non-obvious caveat here though. If you are not a native speaker of the language of the person, you should not assume your brain can hear their pronunciation accurately to reproduce it. Many languages have sounds that simply do not appear in English and if you don't speak those languages, your brain will try its best to map it to English sounds. It will frequently fail badly. If you've never seriously studied a foreign language, you may have never had this experience before, but it is very real. One way to get an intuition for this is to think about how many song lyrics you've later realized you've misheard in your native language.

Chinese

Chinese is a complicated subject and the goal of this guide is to be practical and simple. The vast majority of Chinese people in the world today writing their names using the English alphabet use a system called Pinyin. You can be confident when using this guide with people who were born in mainland China after 1950 or so but use caution with people from Taiwan, or people who emigrated from China before those periods. Cantonese speakers (especially from Hong Kong) are also not covered here (yet).

tricky consonants

First, if you can remember only 4 things:

1. Zh is like a J sound (as in "Jam")
2. X is like a Sh sound (as in "Shot")
3. Q is like a Ch sound (as in "China")
4. C is like a Ts sounds (as in "Its")

These just need to be memorized. The sound most English speakers guess in these cases is to make them sounds like the Zh sound in the middle consonant in the English word "measure". This is very wrong and because that sound gets used for all of them (and J) it can be very confusing.

Zi, Ci, Si, Zhi, Chi, Shi, Ri

Another set of tricky sounds that you can probably improve on and show up in names frequently are this pattern of consonant+i. The "i" sound isn't pronounced like any of the sounds that "i" represents in English. It's not pronounced like a vowel at all. It's just a marker that tells you to just pronounce the consonant sound. A close approximation in English for "si" is the vowel in "roses".

The good news about Chinese surnames for English speakers is that there are very few of them. The word for "the masses" in Chinese (百家姓) can be literally translated as "the old 100 surnames" because of how few there are. Even better news is that the top 20 surnames account for more than 54% of all Chinese people's surnames.

Here's the top 20 with the tricky ones explained: Rank | Pinyin | Pronunciation Tricks ------ | ------- |---------- 1 | Wang | has an "ah" vowel. Wahng 2 | Li | 3 | Zhang | Zh = J, "ah" vowel. Jahng 4 | Liu | sounds like "leeoh" 5 | Chen | rhymes with "fun" in US, in UK rhymes with the second syllable of London 6 | Yang | has an "ah" vowel. Yahng 7 | Huang | 8 | Wu | 9 | Zhao | J sound, rhymes with "wow". Jow 10 | Zhou | J sound, same as English name "Joe" 11 | Xu | same as English word "shoe" 12 | Su | 13 | Ma | 14 | Zhu | same as English word "Jew" 15 | Hu | 16 | Lin | 17 | Guo | take the first syllable in "water" and put a G sound in front. "Gwaww" 18 | He | a trickster! pronounced like the interjection "huh!" 19 | Gao | rhymes with "wow" 20 | Luo | takes the first syllable in "water" and put an L sound in front. "Lwaww"

common given name components

The Chinese have a wide array of possible given names, but many characters with nice meanings (e.g. beautiful, tranquil, great) are used commonly. We list a few tricky common ones in this chart

Name | Pronunciation ------|-------------- Fang | Fahng Feng | Fuhng Gang | Gahng Gui | Gway Hai | english "Hi!" Jing | literally just "jing". not zhing. Jia | Jah, just one syllable, not Jee-ah Jie | Jee-ay, all one syllable Jun | Joon Qiang | Chee-ah-ng, all one syllable Yang | Yahng Yong | Yohng Xiao | the first syllable in "Shower" Xiu | same as english "show" Ye | say "yes" without the 's' sound

Japanese

Japanese romanization of names is very standardized and regular. Japanese pronunciation is one of the most covered topics on the Internet but this is a practical guide for non-experts so we're going to intentionally ignore things like pitch accent, stess vs. syllable timing and just look at a few of the more common gotchas.

Vowels are relatively few and straightforward.
Vowel | Pronunciation ------|-------------- a | ah e | eh i | ee o | oh u | oo

• Watch out for combinations with the letter y. kya, kyu, kyo, nya, ryo, and many more combinations. The y is never pronounced like an "i" in english. Each of those are pronounced as a single syllable in English and the y "flavors" the consonant. The way English speakers say Tokyo as 'Toh-Kee-Oh' is the mistake you want to avoid here. Toh-kyoh.

• if you see the letter combination "tsu", your initial instinct might be to break it up between the t and s, but this is a single sound that is the same as the final consonant 'its' combined with the 'oo' vowel. Example: not Mit-su-bi-shi (Mit-soo-bee-shee) but Mi-tsu-bi-shi (Mee-tsoo-bee-shee).

common names with tricky pronunciations

Name | Pronunciation | Notes ----------|----------------|--------- Yamashita | Yah-MAH-sh-Ta | some vowels (i, u) get removed (called devoicing), this common name has it Kyoko | Kyoh-koh | (not Kee-oh-koh)
Ryousuke | Ryoh-skeh | the -suke suffix is usually skeh

Czech

Czech names are a bit harder than they look and have some unique challenges, at least some of which are quite hidden.

The biggest problem you're going to have is that most of the time when you, the English speaker, see a Czech name, there is a chance it has been simplified of important pronunciation information because Czechs use a few symbols that are not easily typable on a standard English keyboard and therefore, Czech people frequently just leave them out but they contain critical info that can make your pronunciation attempt be WAY off as we'll see in this section. I have a hack that can help for this. First, check their LinkedIn page, as those are frequently written for other Czechs and will have the missing symbols. My second suggestion is to search Wikipedia for the name and you'll often find someone with that same given or surname. You can then use the "other language version" selector to pull up the Czech language page for the full symbol info.

The first type are what most would guess are accent marks (i.e. á, í ,é, etc.). These aren't actually accent marks. They actually mark if the vowel is long or not. If you see these marks, just hold the vowel about 1.5x longer. Don't treat them like accent marks. The stress in Czech names is always on the first syllable.

Vowel | Pronuciation ------|------------- a | ah e | eh ě | yeh i,y | ih o | oh u | oo ů | long oo

If you use a short vowel where you should have used a long vowel, it won't throw the sound off too badly, but that's unfortunately not true of the second type of frequently missing symbols. The symbol is a little hook over certain consonants that completely changes the sound of the consonants. Here's a table of the hook consonants and the other suprising pronunciation of consonants in Czech.

Czech Consonant | Pronunciation ----------------|--------------- š | SH
č | CH ř | RZH - yeah, czech people know you aren't going to get this right. combine an R and the middle consonsant in "measure" and hope for the best. ž | ZH - the middle consonant in "measure" c | TS - like the last consonant in "its" j | Y - as in "yellow" ch | same as scottish "loch". not like ch in "cheese". That's what č is for.

Finally, there are two consonants that act like vowels sometimes: R and L. I think the best approximation for R when used a vowel for R is the final "ir" in "stir". For L, you can use the "ull" in "full" as your approximation.

Example tricky names

This list is heavily seeded with the names of my co-workers that I hear people get wrong all the time as that was my primary motivation for starting this list. Please file an issue if you have a Czech name people butcher and I'll add it.

Name | Pronunciation | notes ----------------|--------------------|------- Václav | VAAHTS-lahv | not VAHK-lahv. Černý | CHEHR-neee | Jan | YAHN | Beneš | BEH-nesh | Elaine on Seinfeld is an example of Rule #1 above :) Petr | PEH-tur | Tomáš | TOH-maahsh | not like Thomas or TOH-mahs or toh-MAAHSH. Karel | KAH-rehl | not like Carol.