As president, Barack Obama takes care to get pronunciations correct. Obama, a stickler for pronunciation

Bill Clinton. George Bush. Jimmy Carter. They’re all pretty easy to pronounce.

But Barack Obama is not so simple. And before he was world famous, people regularly butchered his African name (Bay-rack anyone?). As president, Barack Obama takes care to get pronunciations correct — from heads of state and foreign nations to the director of a small nonprofit in Jersey City.


The text of Obama’s daily briefings includes phonetic spellings of names and places, or the person briefing him will coach him how to say them. Phonetic spellings are also there in Obama’s prepared remarks — although that doesn’t always mean the words wind up rolling off his tongue.

“Did I pronounce your name right?” Obama said Tuesday, pausing after he acknowledged a woman named Alfa Demmellash during an event with nonprofit groups.

Demmellash let the president know he had.

“Good,” Obama said. “When your name is Barack Obama, you're sensitive to these things.”

The audience laughed, but Obama takes pronunciations quite seriously.

His aides know that this is an area where the president wants to be right. In Obama’s view, pronouncing someone’s name or hometown correctly is a simple way of showing respect, they say. It’s a sort of baseline diplomacy. That’s particularly so in foreign relations, where aides say the president will privately practice pronouncing a leader’s name a number times before saying it publicly.

It’s not just people’s names. Obama also often pronounces places in their local way.

Take Pakistan — or PA-kih-ston, as the president says. Obama has pronounced Pakistan the way Pakistanis do for as long as he’s been in public life — a thoughtful consequence of him having Pakistani roommates in college that has its share of critics.

The president affords the same effort to other important words in a culture. In the Muslim – or Moo-slim, as Obama says — world, he pronounces Taliban as Tal-e-bon, and Koran as Ku-ron.

The response to Obama’s efforts as president has been positive, aides say. Pakistanis have told the White House they appreciate it, and some Afghans have even asked if Obama could start regularly pronouncing Afghanistan in the local way (Af-GAN-nih-ston).

“It sends a signal that he tries to see the world from their perspective,” said former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers, who noted that while some Americans may not like it, “I think he thinks there’s more to be gained than lost by reaching out in this very subtle way.”

Obama also tries when it comes to Spanish. He pronounces Chile as Chee-leh (not chili). He used the Spanish pronunciation of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s name in Trinidad and Tobago.

He rolled his r’s in Puerto Rico when discussing Sonia Sotomayor’s background during her nomination announcement. He even started out pronouncing Sotomayor’s name in Spanish (So-toe-my-YOR), but he’d lapsed into the English pronunciation (So-toe-my-yer) by the time he handed the podium over to her.

Those efforts don’t just signal respect to outsiders, but shows employees inside the government, specifically at the State Department, noted Mike McCurry, a former Clinton press secretary, “that the president takes detail seriously.”

“And that has a positive impact on morale in our own government,” McCurry said, “an added benefit to the clear benefit to public diplomacy.”

The president hasn’t always been so in touch. During the campaign Obama’s staff would cringe at his pronunciation of Mass-a-too-setts. (He now says Massachusetts.) And he was ribbed for stumbling over the pronunciation of Iowa’s Pottawattamie County three times before getting it right.

“It’s still early in the morning,” Obama joked at the time.

Critics have chided Obama for his pronunciation efforts, especially Pakistan. But so far no parody has surfaced, like the old "Saturday Night Live" skit with Jimmy Smits, where the cast exaggerated the pronunciation of words like Neek-o-rah-gwa to lampoon English-speaking Americans who pepper their speech with Spanish pronunciations.

And Obama is not getting criticism in the way George W. Bush did for his pronunciation of “nuclear.” But Bush also attempted to connect by speaking a little Spanish at meetings with foreign leaders and during certain events. Clinton didn’t really try to dabble. As Myers noted, “it was hard enough getting through the Arkansas accent, let alone adding a Spanish accent.”

One curious note about Obama and pronunciations is that he apparently changed the pronunciation of his own name as an adult. His father, a Kenyan, went by Bear-ick, with the accent on the first syllable, The Washington Post wrote during the campaign, yet his son used Buh-rock (accent on the second syllable).

Obama has a special affection for language, as his first book, “Dreams of My Father,” makes clear. In it, he writes, “with the right words, everything could change.”

As president, Obama’s efforts extend beyond pronunciations. At his joint news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the East Room, Obama began his remarks this way, “Please, everybody, be seated. Willkommen.”

And when Obama said a few words in Korean at the start of his joint press conference with South Korea’s President Lee Myung-Bak, the South Korean press wrote entire stories about it.

Aides say Obama wants to be armed with those sorts of tidbits. Most of the time they’re woven into his remarks without him having to ask.

In his Cairo speech, for example, Obama knew how to say the Arabic greeting as-salaam aleikum, an aide said, yet had to practice the local pronunciation of Al-Azhar, the name of the university where he spoke.

But even when the stakes aren’t as high, Obama tries to perfect it. At Tuesday’s nonprofit event, he nearly sounded out the last name of Dave Cieslewicz.

Aware of his slow pronunciation of Cieslewicz, Obama informed the audience: “I want to make sure I say that properly.”

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