Antenna Pronunciation

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Chelsea from Louisville, Kentucky.

Hey, Chelsea from Louisville, what’s up?

Well, I was calling because my husband and I have had, I wouldn’t say it’s a disagreement, but maybe a difference of opinion on how to pronounce the word antenna. It’s not a word we use that frequently anymore with, you know, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and everything, but we’re of an age where we grew up with antennas on our TVs and on our cars. And he has always called it an antenna. And I don’t know where he got that from.

Okay, he doesn’t either?

No, he said that that’s the way his family always said it. And he believes it’s the right way to pronounce it. So just because it’s kind of hard to hear the difference sometimes in radio and podcast, spell the different versions for us, how you might write them out phonetically.

So the way I say it, antenna, A-N-T-E-N, like the number 10, U-H, antenna. And he says it antenna, like an, like an apple, and then tan, like I was just at the beach and I’ve got a great tan, and then a.

And Chelsea, is he from Louisville as well?

He’s from Louisville, and I am actually not. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.

Okay. This last Martha zeroed right in on the really important point. There’s something about his southern heritage and his southern linguistic heritage, which may lean him towards saying antenna instead of antenna. And here’s a couple things to say. First of all, he’s not the only one. There are other people online who talk about that pronunciation in their own language.

Let me ask you another question. Does he also say cement and police and insurance?

He sure does.

Putting the stress on the first syllable?

He does.

Yeah, as well as umbrella.

Umbrella, yes. Another great one. Good. When you represented a speech, you didn’t say that he said antenna. But I’m wondering if he doesn’t stress that first syllable.

You know what? I think that he does. And I think that it’s so unnatural for me to do it that it was hard for me to reproduce it.

You just called your husband unnatural, I’m telling.

Okay, so what we’ve done here is we’ve narrowed this down. So first of all, that stressing of the first syllable in some words that in other dialects of English, they don’t stress the first syllable, is a well-known feature of some parts of the Southern English dialect map. So he kind of fits really nicely into this well-known feature of the Southern U.S. English dialect.

But the other thing that happens, there’s a physical thing that happens to the vowels in our mouth when certain conditions happen. For example, that double N in antenna is somewhat nasal for most people, and it can affect the sound of the preceding vowel. So in linguistic terms, we would say the vowel lowers to the near open front unrounded vowel, before the alveolar nasal consonant, eh. Something like that.

Love it. But the other thing that’s happening is that first stressed syllable can pull the vowel that follows it in a different direction than the speaker intends or usually would say. So stressing ant in the first part of the ant-tana may take that second vowel and turn it more like an A and less like an E. It’s a physical, mechanical thing happening in the mouth. It’s not about intelligence or education or anything like that. It’s just a function of how the mouth and all the voice parts inside that produce speech behave.

Well, Chelsea, what we’ve done here is confirmed that your husband has some reasons for saying antenna. He’s not necessarily wrong. He just speaks a different dialect than you do. But we appreciate you sharing this with us and give our best to your husband.

All right.

Thanks so much.

All right.

Take care.

Good talking with you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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