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).

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"

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"

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

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

Polish

Polish looks to an English speaker like a complicated mess of consonants. The consonants are a powerful weapon of special grade.

But even in the exaggerated example from the film (Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz), once we learn that Z modifies sounds in Polish just like H in English sh, ch, zh, it gets much easier. So:

Polish	English approximate	Example first name
cz	ch as in cheese	Czesław
sz	sh as in fresh	Bartosz
rz	z as in azure	Marzena
szcz	sh ch as in fresh cheese	Mszczuj (relax, it's very uncommon!)

Now you're ready to pronounce Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz correctly enough to earn beers from your Polish friends down at the pub. You may as well stop here but the further you go the better you will pronounce!

The natural next step are some Polish-only letters and letters pronounced differently than in English:

Polish	English approximate	Example name
ą	Nasal o, as in French sont	surname Bąk
ć, ci	As cz, but softer	surname Cichy
ę	Nasal e, as in French vin	surname Sęk
j	y as in yes	Jan
ł	w as in window	Sławomira
ń, ni	ny in canyon	Stanisław
ś, si	As sz, but softer	Jaś (nickname of Jan)
w	v as in very	Władysław
y	approx. i as in bin	Tytus
ź, zi	As rz, but softer	surname Ziarno
ż	Same as rz	Błażej

The ones with surnames as exmaple are very uncommon in first names - the reason is that while surnames are usually Slavic in origin, first name usually have Latin, Greek, Hebrew and otherwise Biblical roots, with a few common Slavic first names - so they do not have typical Polish/Slavic sounds. ś, ć, ń, being soft, unvoiced and therefore cute usually occur in nicknames (Sławomir -> Sławuś, Przemysław -> Przemuś, etc.) but rarely in full names. This function is nearly identical to Japanese -chan.

Now, the two final rules which will make you sound as a native. The second-last syllable is accented (pronounced louder). Examples: barBAra, Ada, maRZEna, jan.

In clusters of unvoiced (p, k, t, s, w, sz) + voiced (b, g, d, z, f, rz/ż) consonants, and when the voiced phoneme is at the end of the word, the voiced consonant becomes unvoiced. Examples: Krzysztof -> Kszysztof, Przemysław -> Pszemysłaf.

This concludes all but the most rare rules of Polish pronunciation. Now go and train on your colleagues names, and earn their neverending respect.

Contributed by: Przemysław Buczkowski (prem@prem.moe) (Use my name to train, I don't mind!)

Links:

by Steve Carroll

feedback, suggestions, and contributions very welcome

przemub / PronouncingNamesForEnglishSpeakers