Pronunciation of Louisville

Last updated

The correct pronunciation of the name of Louisville, Kentucky is heatedly debated. [1]

Contents

The three most popular pronunciations are, in order:

  1. US: /ˈləvəl/ LOO-ə-vəl,
  2. /ˈlivɪl/ LOO-ee-vil, and
  3. locally /ˈlʊvəl/ LUUV-əl

All three are generally considered acceptable; the Louisville Visitor Center says that only the rare /ˈlɪsvɪl/ LOO-wis-vil is completely unacceptable (though it is the correct pronunciation for the name of the much smaller Louisville, Colorado).

There are also acceptable hybrid ways of saying the name, such as LOO-ə-vil, a mixture of the first and second pronunciations. [2]

LOO-ə-vəl

The dominant local pronunciation, the "LOO-ə-vəl" pronunciation is widely practiced and accepted. [3] Some even refer to it as the "only" correct way to pronounce the name of the city. [4]

LOO-ee-vil

"LOO-ee-vil", while respecting the proper pronunciation of the name of the French king who gave Louisville its name, is significantly less common among locals. It is, however, frequently used by those not from the area.

LUUV-əl

"LUUV-əl" is a less common, particularly rural way of saying the name. While it is considered acceptable, it is not as widely heard as the others.

Related Research Articles

English orthography is the writing system used to represent spoken English, allowing readers to connect the graphemes to sound and to meaning. It includes English's norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.

Received Pronunciation (RP) is the accent traditionally regarded as the standard and most prestigious form of spoken British English. For over a century, there has been argument over such questions as the definition of RP, whether it is geographically neutral, how many speakers there are, whether sub-varieties exist, how appropriate a choice it is as a standard, and how the accent has changed over time. The name itself is controversial. RP is an accent, so the study of RP is concerned only with matters of pronunciation, while other areas relevant to the study of language standards, such as vocabulary, grammar, and style, are not considered.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louisville, Kentucky</span> Largest city in Kentucky, United States

Louisville is the most populous city in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, sixth-most populous city in the Southeast, and the 27th-most-populous city in the United States. By land area, it is the country's 24th-largest city, although by population density, it is the 265th most dense city. Louisville is the historical county seat and, since 2003, the nominal seat of Jefferson County, on the Indiana border.

In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase. However, these terms are also used to refer more narrowly to cases where two words are run together by the omission of a final sound. An example is the elision of word-final /t/ in English if it is preceded and followed by a consonant: "first light" is often pronounced "firs' light". Many other terms are used to refer to specific cases where sounds are omitted.

Estuary English is an English accent, continuum of accents, or continuum of accent features associated with the area along the River Thames and its estuary, including London, since the late 20th century. Phonetician John C. Wells proposed a definition of Estuary English as "Standard English spoken with the accent of the southeast of England". He views Estuary English as an emerging standard accent of England, while also acknowledging that it is a social construct rather than a technically well-defined linguistic phenomenon. He describes it as "intermediate" between the 20th-century higher-class non-regional standard accent, Received Pronunciation (RP), and the 20th-century lower-class local London accent, Cockney. There is much debate among linguists as to where Cockney and RP end and where Estuary English begins, or whether Estuary English is even a single cohesive accent.

In linguistics, mispronunciation is the act of pronouncing a word incorrectly. The matter of what is or is not mispronunciation is a contentious one, and there is disagreement about the extent to which the term is even meaningful. Languages are pronounced in different ways by different people, depending on such factors as the area they grew up in, their level of education, and their social class. Even within groups of the same area and class, different people can have different ways of pronouncing certain words.

Finnish orthography is based on the Latin script, and uses an alphabet derived from the Swedish alphabet, officially comprising twenty-nine letters but also including two additional letters found in some loanwords. The Finnish orthography strives to represent all morphemes phonologically and, roughly speaking, the sound value of each letter tends to correspond with its value in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) – although some discrepancies do exist.

In sociolinguistics, hypercorrection is nonstandard use of language that results from the overapplication of a perceived rule of language-usage prescription. A speaker or writer who produces a hypercorrection generally believes through a misunderstanding of such rules that the form or phrase they use is more "correct", standard, or otherwise preferable, often combined with a desire to appear formal or educated.

An international nonproprietary name (INN) is an official generic and nonproprietary name given to a pharmaceutical drug or an active ingredient. INNs are intended to make communication more precise by providing a unique standard name for each active ingredient, to avoid prescribing errors. The INN system has been coordinated by the World Health Organization (WHO) since 1953.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Romanization of Arabic</span> Representation of Arabic in Latin script

The romanization of Arabic is the systematic rendering of written and spoken Arabic in the Latin script. Romanized Arabic is used for various purposes, among them transcription of names and titles, cataloging Arabic language works, language education when used instead of or alongside the Arabic script, and representation of the language in scientific publications by linguists. These formal systems, which often make use of diacritics and non-standard Latin characters and are used in academic settings or for the benefit of non-speakers, contrast with informal means of written communication used by speakers such as the Latin-based Arabic chat alphabet.

Texts of the Baháʼí Faith use a standard system of orthography to romanize Persian and Arabic script. The system used in Baháʼí literature was set in 1923, and although it was based on a commonly used standard of the time, it has its own embellishments that make it unique.

The following is a list of common non-native pronunciations that English speakers make when trying to speak foreign languages. Many of these are due to transfer of phonological rules from English to the new language as well as differences in grammar and syntax that they encounter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cotentinais</span> Norman language dialect

Cotentinais is the dialect of the Norman language spoken in the Cotentin Peninsula of France. It is one of the strongest dialects of the language on the French mainland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of slavery in Kentucky</span>

The history of slavery in Kentucky dates from the earliest permanent European settlements in the state, until the end of the Civil War. In 1830, enslaved African Americans represented 24 percent of Kentucky's population, a share that had declined to 19.5 percent by 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. Most enslaved people were concentrated in the cities of Louisville and Lexington and in the hemp- and tobacco-producing Bluegrass Region and Jackson Purchase. Other enslaved people lived in the Ohio River counties, where they were most often used in skilled trades or as house servants. Relatively few people were held in slavery in the mountainous regions of eastern and southeastern Kentucky; they served primarily as artisans and service workers in towns.

Nucular is a common, proscribed pronunciation of the word "nuclear". It is a rough phonetic spelling of. The Oxford English Dictionary's entry dates the word's first published appearance to 1943.

The Standard Written Form or SWF of the Cornish language is an orthography standard that is designed to "provide public bodies and the educational system with a universally acceptable, inclusive, and neutral orthography". It was the outcome of a process initiated by the creation of the public body Cornish Language Partnership, which identified a need to agree on a single standard orthography in order to end previous orthographical disagreements, secure government funding, and increase the use of Cornish in Cornwall.

A phonological rule is a formal way of expressing a systematic phonological or morphophonological process in linguistics. Phonological rules are commonly used in generative phonology as a notation to capture sound-related operations and computations the human brain performs when producing or comprehending spoken language. They may use phonetic notation or distinctive features or both.

One aspect of the differences between American and British English is that of specific word pronunciations, as described in American and British English pronunciation differences. However, there are also differences in some of the basic pronunciation patterns between the standard dialects of each country. The standard varieties for each are in fact generalizations: for the U.S., a loosely defined spectrum of unmarked varieties called General American and, for Britain, a collection of prestigious varieties most common in southeastern England, ranging from upper- to middle-class Received Pronunciation accents, which together here are abbreviated "RP". However, other regional accents in each country also show differences, for which see regional accents of English speakers.

References

  1. Adams, Kirby (June 7, 2017). "Do you say it right? Louisville is one of the top cities Americans mispronounce". Courier Journal . Retrieved December 8, 2023.
  2. "How to properly pronounce "Louisville"". WDRB. June 21, 2014. Retrieved December 8, 2023.
  3. "10 Things Only People from Louisville Will Understand". movoto.com. Retrieved December 8, 2023.
  4. Puente, Victor (August 2, 2023). "Good Question: What is the right way to pronounce Louisville?". WKYT . Retrieved December 8, 2023.