Grammar Girl here, I'm Mignon Fogarty.

Last week, I looked up how to pronounce Iran for the piece on toponyms, along with 15 other words.

That piece was a pronunciation beast.

So I am pleased to have the first piece today by Valerie Friedland on why people pronounce

Iran in different ways. It's actually a joke in my family that if there's a vowel in a name,

I am sure to pick the wrong way to say it. There's a grocery store in Arizona called

Bashes that I called Boshas, and apparently last week I still

even pronounced Genoa wrong, so sorry. And then after that segment, we'll talk about words for

smells. This next piece is by Valerie. With the war in Iran on everyone's lips, you might have noticed an inconsistency in the way that nation's name is said,

varying between a more native-like Iran pronunciation and a more Americanized Iran one.

An everyday listener might just chalk this up to being the result of regional differences,

or the version we learned growing up, like the alternate ways Americans have of referring to

information as data or data, and the thing on top of our house as a roof or a roof.

But as a linguist who studies what our accents reveal about our histories and social identities,

I know that the way we pronounce things often gives off clues about who we are and what we believe in,

and that appears to be the case with these two distinct pronunciations.

It's probably not a big surprise to learn that listeners often hear certain words or accents as indicating someone's political inclinations.

That's because people are primed to notice patterns that mark group membership, be it a style of clothes or pronouncing fire more like far.

Once they notice these patterns, people then tend to assign whatever traits are believed to characterize that group to the sounds of their speech.

For instance, in 2018, researchers examined how people perceived potential political candidates with a Southern versus non-southern American accent,

and found that listeners perceived Southern-sounding politicians as more likely to be conservative

and to hold right-leaning views on issues such as gun rights and abortion. All that from hearing

...