The Many Mispronunciations of PoKéMoN
Im sure everybody has had their fair share of saying Pokémon names wrong, right? If you have plz name one! Here’s one of mine! When I was little, my dad and brother (who were Pokémon Go fans at the time. Now im the only fan in my family 😖) would joke around, saying Pony-YEET-a, so I thought ponyta’s name was pronounced that way for years lol.
Comments
-
Toxtricity and Hydreigon.
For a long long time I mispronounced these two…
3 -
The Deino line
2 -
I also said JEE-uh-RAH-dos (gyarados)
2 -
ah yes… how could I forget the king of mispronouncing 😁 Gayrados
2 -
How about those people who call Pokémon "Pokéman?"
2 -
Lol
1 -
The word "Pokémon" itself is ironically the biggest victim of this. Coming from the English words "pocket" and "monster", adapted into Japanese as ポケットモンスター(poketto monsutaa), abbreviated as ポケモン(po-ke-mon), then fed back into English, even with as accent above the "e" to assist in pronunciation, you still end up with wild and varied pronunciations.
It was particularly bad in the 90s when official localisations hadn't yet been settled upon, and Japanese media was still relatively niché and unfamiliar. Eventually they seem to settle on something like "poe-keh-mon".
I recall watching the anime on SMTV (shoutout to any fellow British millennials) and one Saturday a viewer wrote a letter to the hosts about this very topic. Dec adopted their pronunciation, only to stop the episode the second it was pronounced and yell at the camera about it.
As a side note, certain American accents seem to weirdly overemphasise parts of particular words like Pokémon. "POE-KEY-MON" is a common one. Mario is another one. For some reason, many American friends I have known just have to give it the full MAH-REE-OH!
Yes, a lot of Americans speak in upper case. You are loud.
3
