Avocado vs. Alvocado

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Brittany calling from Puyallup, Washington.

Hey, Brittany.

Welcome to the show.

Where in Washington?

Seattle?

Puyallup.

Puyallup.

It’s south of Seattle.

Okay, Puyallup.

Cool name.

What’s going on?

So I was going to call and ask you all a question about a word that my husband and I discovered that we say differently a few years ago.

And the way he says it is the way that it’s spelled and that I’ve heard 90% of other people say it.

And the way I say it is the way I’ve only heard my mother say it.

So the word is avocado, and I say it with an L right before the V, and he does not.

And when he and I discovered this, I had never noticed before and thought, oh, I must be wrong, because there’s no V, L when you spell it.

And so I tried to change the way I say it, which was really difficult.

And then when we made our cross-country move, I started listening to y’all’s show a lot and thought maybe it was regional.

And so I tried to look it up online.

I tried to use the dictionary of American regional English and I couldn’t find anything.

So my husband was like, well, you should call the experts and see what they say.

So just to clarify, this is the wonderful green fruit that becomes guacamole, right?

Yes.

Avocado with an AL at the beginning instead of just an AV.

That sounds like a knock-knock.

I’ve only heard my mom say it.

Okay.

Okay.

There’s a bunch of stuff to say here.

One is, yeah, if you Google the spelling of avocado with an L as avocado, you will find it out there.

And people use it without remarking upon it.

And actually, if you look in the health apps, like the one where you track the food that you’re eating when you’re trying to be better about your diet and so forth, you will find many entries with avocado spelled A-L-V.

It’s really interesting.

However, they’re all wrong.

Okay.

Included, Brittany?

Well, here’s what’s happening.

I think typing it out is one of those things where leave the L out.

That’s clearly and definitely incorrect.

It does not have an L in it.

When you say it, though, there’s this phonetic thing that’s happening because of who you are and where you’re from.

And that’s where you have a little bit of an out here.

I am not surprised to find that people from Texas are doing a little L insertion in this word.

There’s a thing that happens in some regional dialects where the vowels are a little different than other places in the country.

So in those places, the vowel in this word, the first vowel, is more like aw, A-W-E, and less like as in A-H.

And so the aw leaves the mouth and tongue in a position that kind of leads to an L-like sound as the vowel transitions into the consonant.

So what’s happening is, let me just put this a different way.

So instead of the tongue being behind your lower teeth, it’s pulling up towards the roof of the mouth.

And you can hear this in other people who say both as if it’s B-O-L-T-H instead of both.

Okay, yeah, I’ve heard that before.

Okay, yeah.

So a linguist would describe this as it’s moving the backed vowel sound to a consonant at the front of the mouth so that you hit an L along the way.

Okay, that’s awesome.

Yeah.

So it’s a physical thing that’s happening in your mouth where your tongue is behaving a little differently because of the way you’re performing the vowel.

Okay.

Well, I took a linguistic anthropology course once, and they mentioned something like that.

So I’m not surprised to find out that’s what I’m doing.

There you go.

Yeah.

And what about the words, say, D-R-A-W-I-N-G?

Oh, nice.

How do you say that one?

Oh, drawing.

Okay.

You say drawing.

You don’t say drawing.

I say drawing.

So my mom is a born and bred native Texan and my dad is a Air Force brat who lived all over.

So I seem to pick up some things from him and some things from her.

And so we always have fun picking out like, oh, do you say, you know, towel or towel or like different words.

And so I seem to get different ones from each of them.

I don’t know if that’s a thing, but that seems to be oddness in my pronunciation where it’s different depending on the word.

Yeah, you do pick some stuff up from your parents.

Mostly you pick it up from your peers, the people you go to school with, the people who are your friends.

Oh, okay.

Anyway, so it’s not an accepted pronunciation.

You’re not going to find it recorded in the pronunciation guides of dictionaries.

But there is a way to explain it linguistically, and I think that’s what we’ve done here.

Okay, well, that’s really awesome.

I’m really excited to find that out, and I will have to tell my mother because she does the same thing I do.

Brittany, thank you so much for calling.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate it.

It was very fun.

Bye-bye.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Now we can talk about almonds.

Almonds.

Or almonds.

Or salmon.

Yeah, how do you pronounce those words?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.