Table Of ContentOXFORD
BBC GUIDE TO
PRONUNCIATION
OXFORD
BBC GUIDE TO
PRONUNCIATION
%"
Lena Olausson
Catherine Sangster
OXFORD
UN IIIIIIIII RESS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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ISBN O-19-280710-2
ISBN 978-0-19-280710-6
Typeset in Miller
by Interactive Sciences Ltd, Gloucester
Printed in Italy by
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Contents
Preface viz
Note on trademarks and proprietary terms viii
Introduction iar
Oxsono BBC GUIDE T0 PRONUNCIATION 1
Preface
The Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation gives guidance on
the pronunciation of names, words, and phrases. Despite its
A-Z format it is not so much a dictionary as a collection of
particular pronunciations which are tricky, much debated,
curious, or exotic. It is intended for students, teachers, actors,
journalists, broadcasters, and anyone interested in ‘saying
things right’. The pronunciations are given in an easy-to-read
phonetic respelling and also in the system familiar to users of
larger Oxford dictionaries, the alphabet of the International
Phonetic Association (IPA). Information panels and notes
discuss particular pronunciation issues in more detail. Its
compact size means that it can be accommodated on a
crowded desk, or even slipped into a bag, and be referred to
quickly. The book’s main source is the BBC Pronunciation
Unit’s own database, and the Wide range of topics and
languages covered reflects the great diversity of the BBC’s
output.
Since its earliest days the BBC has taken pronunciation
very seriously. Lord Reith, the first Director General, set up an
Advisory Committee on Spoken English in 1926. This
committee included Robert Bridges, the then Poet Laureate,
playwright George Bernard Shaw, and phonetician Daniel
Jones. Their task was to advise announcers on ‘words of
doubtful pronunciation’; they also turned their attention to
place names in the British Isles and beyond. The committee
was disbanded with the outbreak of the Second World War.
Since then the provision of pronunciation advice within the
BBC has been the responsibility of the full—time staff of the
Pronunciation Unit. Like our predecessors we are linguists
with specific skills in phonetics and languages, and our remit
is broad: to research and advise on the pronunciation of any
viii
PREFACE
name, word, or phrase in any language required by anyone in
the BBC. It is on our work, and our collection of approximately
200,000 pronunciations, that this book is based.
For this reason we owe particular thanks to all our prede-
cessors in the Unit and the Advisory Committee, on whose
shoulders we stand. We are also indebted to the editors of the
English pronunciation dictionaries which are always at our
elbow as we work, especially John Wells, Clive Upton, Peter
Roach, and Jane Setter, and to those of pronunciation diction-
aries in other languages, in particular Duden Ausspracho
wiirterbuch, Larousse Dictionnaire de la Prononciation, and
RAJ Dizionario d’Ortografia e di Pronunzia. Thanks are due
to Angus Stevenson, James McCracken, Judy Pearsall, and
Gillian Evans at OUP, and to Trish Stableford for proof-
reading. At the BBC, this book would not have got off the
ground without the support of Guy Strickland, Jenny Martin,
and Chris Cullen, and would not have stayed in the air without
Martha Figueroa-Clark and Nick Marcus.
Lena Olausson
Catherine Sangster
Note on trademarks and proprietary terms
This dictionary includes some words which have, or are asserted to
have, proprietary status as trademarks or otherwise. Their inclusion
does not imply that they have acquired for legal purposes a non-
proprietary or general significance, nor any other judgement
concerning their legal status. In cases where the editorial staff have
some evidence that a word has proprietary status this is indicated in
the entry for that word by the label trademark, but no judgement
concerning the legal status of such words is made or implied thereby.
Introduction
About the book
Our job in the BBC Pronunciation Unit is to help broadcasters
correctly pronounce anything they may need to say, and this
book is a distillation of our advice. Compared to a standard
pronunciation dictionary, therefore, its contents are more
varied and the balance is shifted away from words towards
proper names and other encyclopedic entries. The pronuncia-
tions we have chosen include those for famous people, capital
cities, rivers and other geographical features, plants and
animals, food and drink, scientific terms, drugs and diseases,
musical instruments, composers and their works, and charac-
ters from literature and myth. We have selected only those
words and phrases which we believe a native speaker of
English might be unsure how to pronounce, rather than
supplying a larger, more exhaustive set of lexical items. Any
such selection process will of course be subjective, and our
broad scope means that many interesting pronunciations will
inevitably be missing from this small book. However, we
decided it best to adopt a magpie-like approach, informed by
the usual eclecticism of a day’s work in the Pronunciation
Unit, where we regularly flit from news stories to music to
drama to quizzes or science programmes.
For each entry (with the exception of a few family names for
which multiple pronunciations are possible) we give just one
correct pronunciation. VVhere more than one pronunciation
would be acceptable we do not list all the possible slight
variants, but where variant pronunciations are significant or
noteworthy they are discussed in a note. The pronunciations
must reflect one particular accent, and in most respects this is
the standardized accent of British English known as Received
Pronunciation. However, our English pronunciations do not
INTRODUCTION
reflect any systematic model of RP in terms of features such
as yod coalescence (ch and j instead of ty and dy in words
like Tuesday and seduce): for this level of detail readers should
consult an English pronunciation dictionary such as the
Longman Pronunciation Dictionawjy, the Oxford Dictionmy
ofPronunciationfor Current English, or the Cambridge Eng-
lish Pronouncing Dictionary. This topic is discussed further
in the Respelling and IPA sections of this introduction and
also the panel on BBC English.
Gaddafi, Mu’ammer (also Qaddafi)
Libyan head of state
muu-um-uhr guh-dah-fi /mo,/\me(r)
ga'do:fi/, Arabic [I‘1'111'AII"lI1'18(I‘)
qao'Oae:fi]
- Established anglicization; see ARABIC
paneL
Personal names are listed surname-first for ease of location,
although pronunciations of full names are given in their
natural order. Significant variant spellings are given, as are
unusual plural forms. If both a non-standard plural and
a regular -s plural are possible, this is indicated in a note. A
brief definition indicates nationality or language where
appropriate, and helps confirm that you are looking at the
right entry: this is not a full-scale dictionary-type definition.
The pronunciation is given first in respelling, and then in IPA;
in some cases native IPA will also be given in square brackets.
Cross-references and indications of established anglicizations
are given in short (bulleted) notes, and longer notes (between
ruled lines) discuss more complex aspects such as variant
pronunciations or common mispronunciations.
Abbreviations used:
AM = American English pl. = plural
BR = British English sing. = singular
Pronunciation policy
How does the Pronunciation Unit decide what the ‘right’
pronunciation is? Our work is mostly concerned with foreign
pronunciations, and here we consult native speakers as often
INTRODUCTION
as possible. The BBC World Service currently broadcasts in
over thirty languages, and we work closely with the different
language teams. We have a network of contacts outside the
BBC, such as embassies, universities, and museums. We also
hold a wide range of specialist pronunciation dictionaries and
other written material that has been collected since the days of
the Advisory Committee on Spoken English.
All our foreign pronunciations are subject to a degree of
anglicization. Our general aim is to recommend pronuncia-
tions that are as close as possible to the native language in
question, but modified slightly so that they still flow naturally
in an English broadcast. The level of anglicization has altered
over the years as broadcasters and audiences have become
more familiar with the sounds of foreign languages and the
BBC has served an increasingly global audience. There
are also what We call established anglicizations, which are
foreign names that have accepted English forms, either of
both spelling and pronunciation (e.g. Warsaw for Polish
Warszawa), or just of pronunciation (e.g. Paris). We always
recommend that established anglicizations are used wherever
they exist, as using a native pronunciation instead can confuse
the listener, or even sound affected. For more on this topic, see
the Anglicization panel.
Personal names, foreign or English, are researched with the
owner of the name whenever possible.
For English place names our aim is to recommend a stan-
dardized version of the local pronunciation. However, the
Pronunciation Unit has never issued any recommendations in
regard to British dialects, so we would certainly not insist that
someone with a northern accent use a long ah in Bath, even
though that is the local pronunciation—and vice versa for
Newcastle. VVhere more than one form is used locally it can
still be useful to recommend a single pronunciation, for the
sake of consistency.
VVhen deciding on recommendations for particular
English words we rely heavily on other specialist English
pronouncing dictionaries. Sometimes our particular experi-
ence can guide us on certain words that always seem to cause
