You hear it on the streets. On the news. In the halls of Congress. There’s no agreement on the issue, except this: “Iraq” is a problem. There are at least four common ways English speakers say the word “Iraq,” including “Ee-RACK,” “Ih-ROCK,” “Eye-ROCK,” and “Uh-RACK.” Which is correct? Technically, none. The Q at the end of the word is, in Arabic, a back-of-the-throat sound that doesn’t exist in English. Linguists call it a “voiceless plosive” (don’t worry, there won’t be a quiz on this later). The R is a little rougher as well, so a native Arabic-speaker would say something like “Ihhhr-RAHCH.” It doesn’t roll easily off an American tongue. The closest we can come is probably “Ih-ROCK.” But is that officially correct? “There isn’t any reason why there should be one single standard way of pronouncing it, because it isn’t obvious from the spelling whether there’s one way,” says Bruce Paulson, a sensible professor of linguistics at the University of Minnesota. And while there’s a strong argument for staying faithful to the original Arabic, there’s also a natural American tendency to alter foreign words to sound less, well, foreign. You might have noticed: “Paris,” not “Paree.” So what happens when Middle Eastern voiceless plosives meet the tough Midwestern palate? To find out, The Rake went in search of the Minnesota accent in its native habitat, by which we mean we called a bunch of our friends and relatives at dinnertime and asked.
HOW DO MINNESOTANS SAY IT?
Eye-RACK 42 percent
Ih-RACK 20
Ih-ROCK 17.5*
Ee-ROCK 10
Ee-RACK 5
IH-rack 3.5
Eye-ROCK 2
Axis of Evil 0 *The right way
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