Pronouncing Ubuntu

I have been asked the question, "How do you say Ubuntu properly?" When it comes to things like this I get annoyed though. I hate hearing English speaking people destroy another language's words. Yet on good will for this article I promised a friend I would not flame, rant, or totally demean people for saying it wrong. So this one time I'm going to be good, and I'm going to try to be straight forward and gentle about the subject. Anyway, this topic is something that has actually popped up in about 2 or 3 emails. Not to mention someone I know asked me directly about it. So I did a small experiment. I wanted to find out who it was that had the hardest time reading the word correctly, and what were the wrong pronunciations. It went a little something like this....

I wrote down the word UBUNTU on a piece of paper. I then went to people, who I didn't know, and asked them to say this word for me. No one was exempt from this test. I went to Whites, Blacks, Latins, Arabs, Asians, Male or Female. I didn't exactly keep count of how many people I asked, but it had to be around 50 or 60 people. The result was interesting. Very few of the native English speaking white people got the word correct. Yet the Serbian native speaking White people got the word right the majority of the time. For the Blacks it was 50/50 with the word. For the Latins all except 1 got the word right...I'm not sure how that happened but it did. The Arabs all got the word right.

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The Asians were all a different story. The East Asians such as Chinese were half and half on how the word was said. Half of them got the word right, the other half failed on the word. As for the Indians, (yes Indians from India are considered Asian if you didn't know) all of them said the word correct. So, I think this all depended on the native language.

Now is the part where I show you the wrong pronunciations. It seems there were really only 4 generally wrong pronunciations. They weren't too far off, but they made me cringe...yes I know I'm anal, but it's just not something I like. I'm the type of person that does their best to get an accent correct, and pronunciation correct when speaking another language.

Anyway, here are the ways Ubuntu was said, spelled in English phonetics:

Ubuntu (oo-bun-too)

Ubuntu (you-bun-too)

Ubuntu (you-boon-too)

Ubuntu (you-bunt-you)

As you can see they aren't too dis-similar from each other. The biggest things were people pronouncing the first "u" as "you", and the second "u" with a short vowel sound in English. So let me explain some things about the majority of other languages and the letter "u"....trust me this won't be so bad.

In most languages around the world the letter "u" is prounced as "oo" in English. Such as in the words food, spool, and tool. Ubuntu is from an African language, and from what I understand the "u" in the African languages seems to have the "oo" property. This rule I know for sure goes for Spanish, Japanese, Italian, and Hindi. This is why when I did the test all but one Latin (I don't know why it was only one... maybe he didn't know Spanish at all?), and all the Indian students spoke the word correct.

So, now that we know about the letter "u", let's try the word again shall we? Watch my phonetic spelling, and marvel at how easy it is to say Ubuntu:

Ubuntu (oo-boon-too)

I will try to be fair and understand that you may feel weird saying it as (oo-boon-too).... Just remember if you say it around me I will be holding back from trying to correct you or just plain drown you in the river or something....but I promise I'll try to be good and hold back from physical harm or emotional insults... I really promise...I'm not really a violent guy and I do my best not to be rude... but sometimes this type of stuff gets on my nerves and I end up saying something...

Still, I will try to understand that you feel weird for saying a word correct, and feel better for saying it incorrectly because it doesn't sound foreign to you..... even though if you practice saying the word correctly it won't be so foreign after a bit of some time. It's like riding a bike maybe?

I hope this helps for the people who emailed me this question, and for my man J who asked me about this himself. I really want to get the whole world saying the word right, after all I hope to get the whole world to try Ubuntu at least once.

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Pronouncing Ubuntu