Adrian Barich: Splutter season is upon us, cue your favourite mispronunciations

It’s a challenging time in Barra World. I’m being tested on a daily basis and my powers of concentration are being called into question.

Don’t panic though: this is not about what you might term a serious life problem but about a difficult, demanding, exacting, taxing need to be correct.

It happens every year at this time — I call it “splutter season”.

And this year it started with the French Open women’s champion.

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Her name is Iga Swiatek. I’m sure you’ve heard of her but I’m equally sure you’ve been mispronouncing her name for years.

As a sports presenter it’s my job to get it right and help spread the correct pronunciation. (Don’t worry, it was news to me too).

The first name Iga is actually EE-ga like eager and the surname is shvee-YONE-tek. (Bet you can’t get it right first time).

As my friend with a Polish wife keeps telling me, stress is almost always on the penultimate (next-to-last) syllable in Poland and there are actually three sounds in Polish that do not exist in the English language.

Imagine my surprise when I googled “Polish for Dummies” and a book popped up. If ever a book title suited a reader, this was the one.

And while I’ve got you, when he was in Perth, Novak Djokovic confirmed that his name is in fact pronounced: “NO-vak” “JOKE-oh-vich”. Similarly Alex de Minaur helped us out with this phonetic spelling: “AL-eks” “duh-min-OHR “.

Not everyone is open to this type of advice though, I must say. One of my favourite memories of the great media commentator George Grljusich was an argument I had with him over how to say the name of Russian tennis star Anna Kournikova.

George was adamant her surname was pronounced Cor-nick-o-va. This despite me telling him that Anna herself had said it was Corn-nee-cova. George’s response? “Well, she’s wrong.”

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that myself and some of my colleagues at 7NEWS do, in fact, write names phonetically for the autocue. That’s after running difficult names and places past Rick and Sue, who are experts in diction, elocution and accent.

Tim McMillan is a massive fan of English soccer and his advice comes in handy too. I mean, who could have thought a team called Norwich could cause problems for some less learned people in the industry (ie, me).

Thank goodness, gone are the days of Nor-witch playing so-and-so in the FA Cup.

My absolute favourite stuff-up happened on radio, when a good friend of mine waxed lyrical about the effort of a certain soccer great by the name of Terry Henry (Thierry Henry). It was just about the most Aussie thing I’d ever heard up to that date.

To be clear, I’m not saying that Ryan Daniels and I will be pushing into pretentious territory by trying to pronounce names with a foreign accent.

I did once get an email from a viewer informing me that if I was in Spain I would be saying world No.2 Carlos Alcaraz’s name with a “th” at the end, instead of a Z. Keep watching to see if we revert to saying Carloth Alcarwrath in a Spanish accent on the news during Wimbledon.

Other challenges during Euro 2024 and also looking ahead to the Paris Olympics will be the Christian name Joaquin, which apparently is not JO-a-kwin but hwa-KEEN, can you believe?

Even the Irish name Tadgh is tricky, it’s TIE-gh.

I had a close friend named Siobhan so I’ve got that covered — it’s shi-VAWN, not Sy-o-bee-han as someone once said.

And let’s just say I wasn’t upset when Ole Gunnar Solskjaer left Manchester United.

As the great Liverpool legend Ian Rush once said about the difficulties of adjusting to playing football and living in Italy: “It was like being in a foreign country”.

Of course, we are super sensitive about this stuff, as my friend and colleague discovered when he once made a boo boo with an NBA story. Full of confidence and perhaps not being a huge NBA fan, on this particular day reigning NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo came out as Giannis AN-te-TOKA-toma-TOO.

I’ll admit it, ever since then, if this basketball giant’s name comes across my desk, I refer to him by his nickname, the Greek Freak. I think most people adopt that approach, don’t they?

Even though he’s in his seventh season as an AFL player, I heard that North Melbourne’s Tristan Xerri reckons only a couple of broadcasters pronounce his surname correctly.

Xerri has been pronounced as everything from cherry and exerry to zerry. And you could have knocked me over with a feather when he said it’s actually pronounced sherry, because in Maltese, the X is pronounced as “sh”.

Now you know. A word of advice as we wrap up too: never make fun of someone who pronounces a word wrong. It means they learned it by reading.