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.
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 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).
First, if you can remember only 3 things:
- Zh is like a J sound (as in "Jam")
- X is like a Sh sound (as in "Shot")
- Q is like a Ch sound (as in "China")
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.
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" |
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. |
| 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" |
Finally, be careful with the letter 'c' in Pinyin names. It represents the ending consonant in "its". In names you will see "Cai" which is pronounced "Ts-eye".
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).
| 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 |
by Steve Carroll
feedback, suggestions, and contributions very welcome