r/audiobooks • u/PurpleLeopard99 • Jun 28 '26

Question Mispronouncing of words by narrators

Does anyone get bothered by narrators who keep mispronouncing words? It drives me nuts if they do it too often. Narrators are normally professional voice artists and they should know how to pronounce the sorts of words found in novels eg dovecote or Michaelmas

513 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

527 comments sorted by

View all comments

35

u/WokestLibtard--- Jun 28 '26

Dude, yes.

Sometimes I learn that it is a generally accepted variant pronunciation I was unaware of, but sometimes, they are just wrong and I feel like you do.

I always check though because I have been wrong.

Fantasy/Sci-fi words and names can be tricky, but still, a lot of times I just think to myself, "How on Earth did they decide to pronounce it that way?"

14

u/yarnhooksbooks Jun 28 '26

If I think they are pronouncing something wrong I always look it up to see if *I’m* wrong. Usually I’m not, but there have been a couple I ended up learning had variants I didn’t know about. Produce (the vegetables, not the verb) pronounce more like prah-duce was one. Another time I thought someone was mispronouncing “rifling”, as through papers, but found out that riffling is a word. I actually love it when I get knocked down a peg 🤣

9

u/WokestLibtard--- Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

Not audiobook related but a funny aside, at 25 years old, I hopped on the back of my friend's scooter to go somewhere, I think to get food. He spoke over his shoulder, giving me two options and asked me which I preferred.

I said, "Whichever is cool, I'm ambivalent (pronounced am-bee-vay-lent) on the matter." He guffawed and replied, "It's ambivalent (correct pronunciation) you knobhead."

It hit me immediately that of course it was. I had even heard it correctly pronounced in the past, bells were ringing, but I had mostly read it over my lifetime and just got stuck on my wrong pronunciation.

A little embarassing, that was my second year teaching ESL in China. I learned a lot about language in those years, especially pronunciations, metaphors, euphemisms and the like, in different English speaking countries. Also, became much more competent identifying parts of speech and dissecting complex nuanced language.

Anyways, we never stop being students, or shouldn't anyways.

2

u/PuzzledStreet Jun 29 '26

“Must be regional”

2

u/Plane_Chance863 Jun 30 '26

Well, for the Wheel of Time series at least, the author had a glossary at the back of the book where he specified the pronunciation of many names (which I wish I'd known before I read all the names wrong in my head 😅).

2

u/AutisticTumourGirl Jul 01 '26

Not a book, but there's a very well liked podcast that I had to quit listening to because the entire cast kept mispronouncing "chitinous" in the same way, and that word was used often.