It has been the centre of a dessert war for years, and now the humble pavlova has a new claim to fame as the most difficult New Zealand food item for foreigners to pronounce.
Showing there is no end to the myriad surveys that you didn’t know that you needed, new research from word search tool WordTips looked at popular foods and drinks in 130 countries.
Each item was then searched using Forvo, a library of user-submitted pronunciation recordings. The higher the number of listens on Forvo was considered to equate to the difficulty of the word to pronounce.
On its website, WordTips said: “The name of a dish or beverage lifted straight from another language may have confusing letter combinations and foreign characters that native English speakers aren’t able to pronounce intuitively.
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“Some letter and sound combinations that are common in one language might not be present at all in another, like the Spanish rolled ‘r’.”
New Zealand’s humble pavlova (pav·low·vah) had 3600 listens on Forvo during the research period of August this year.
Across the pond, the lamington (la·muhng·tn) was the most difficult Australian-associated food on 13,000 listens.
Worldwide there was one clear winner of the most difficult food item to pronounce, and it doesn’t help that there are regional variations for the word.
Chorizo (chur·ree·zow, chuh·ree·zow, or cho·ri·tho depending what part of the planet you are on) had a whopping 22 million listens.
“Back in 2017, the humble sausage famously divided UK viewers of the TV show MasterChef, who took to Twitter to share their own beliefs as to how its name should be pronounced,” the research said.
“The fact that the word has several accepted pronunciations internationally – from cho·ri·tho in Spain to chur·ree·zow in the US – only adds to the evidently widespread confusion.”
In second place was France’s croissant (kwa·son), with 2.9 million listens; in third place was scone, which is either skon or skone depending on where you live, with 1.2 million.
There are a couple of head scratchers also listed. For foods associated with the United States, burger (burr·gr) topped the charts with 886,000 listens, while hummus (huh·muhs), a chickpea-based dip, is the most mispronounced food local to five different countries.
The most difficult worldwide drink to say is the wine rioja. Again this changes depending on where you are from. Spanish speakers will pour a glass of rrio·ha, while American and British speakers will respectively say ree·ow·huh and ree·ock·uh.
Researchers do say that people shouldn’t be embarrassed about making any mistakes.
“Nobody gets through life without coming across a word they have no idea how to pronounce. As we’ve discovered, even words that have an established, widely accepted pronunciation in one place can be correctly pronounced differently somewhere else.”
To see the full map of the most mispronounced foods and drinks, click here.
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