"Those paying attention to New York politics this fall (basically everyone, it seemed) couldn't help but notice that Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani often saw his name mispronounced, misspelled, and generally mangled. All the same, he went from one percent name recognition to the winning candidate, beating by a wide margin former governor Andrew Cuomo. It got so bad that the mayor-elect even scolded the former governor during a debate, saying, "The name is Mamdani. M-A-M-D-A-N-I.""
"Both the politician and the Paris museum appear on the American version of a list of the most mispronounced words of 2025, released Thursday by language-learning company Babbel and closed-captioning company the Captioning Group (for whom rampant mispronunciations must surely be a major headache). The Louvre also made the UK version of the list, compiled by Babbel and the British Institute of Verbatim Reporters, an association of subtitling professionals."
Zohran Mamdani experienced frequent mispronunciations, misspellings, and public mangling of his name during his New York campaign. He rose from one percent name recognition to winning the mayoral race, defeating former governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo repeatedly mispronounced and even misspelled Mamdani's surname, once writing "Mamadani," an action described as either bizarre carelessness or racist trolling. The $102 million Louvre Museum heist drew attention to widespread inexpertise in French pronunciation, since Louvre is properly pronounced LOO-vruh with a soft guttural R. The Grand Larousse links Louvre to a wolf hunting den, from Latin lupus. Babbel and captioning groups placed Mamdani and Louvre on 2025 mispronounced-word lists in the US and UK.
Read at ARTnews.com
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