When They Can’t Pronounce Our Names

“Mispronunciation is not a weakness of the tongue. It is a measure of power.”

In 2006, international media outlets fumbled over how to say “Tsvangirai.” The BBC’s Pronunciation Unit eventually settled on chang-girr-ayi, a creative workaround that bent English phonetics to match a Shona name. But what’s striking isn’t just the effort; it’s the asymmetry. When we mispronounce Thames or Worcestershire, we’re corrected, gently, mockingly, or sternly. But when they mispronounce Chimanimani, they rename it.

And we laugh along.

There’s a strange pride in mastering foreign phonetics, even at the expense of our own. Our mouths stretch to respect their vowels, yet shrink when our cousins stumble on Dzvukamanja. We internalise the colonial trick: that dignity lies in proximity to the conqueror’s tongue.

Meanwhile, the sounds of our languages, whistled sibilants, implosives, tonal rises are reduced to curiosities. Their struggle to pronounce becomes newsworthy. Ours is treated as shame.

But language remembers. Names carry not just sound, but soil. Tsvangirai is not an exotic syllabic puzzle. It is history, protest, meaning. It resists erasure every time it’s spoken fully.

Let us mispronounce Worcestershire in peace. But let us insist, without apology, that Chiedza is not Chieza, and Mutemwa is not Moo-tem-wa. These names are not waiting for BBC approval. They are already true.

Yet, I hear someone ask; Who stops you from pronouncing the way you want? Your answer, “Colonial Residue”. The queen’s language was given with strict rules.

Our parents were beaten for both wrong spelling and pronunciation; bending the rules was taboo. They became language police, and today it’s “laughable” to mispronounce an English word, yet few remember how that became!