Dialects of Crayon

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, this is Kit Hedley from Dallas, Texas. How are you?

Hi, Kit. We’re doing well. How are you?

What’s up?

I had a little question about my wife, the art teacher.

Okay.

She’s got a little bit of a thorny relationship with the word.

It’s a word that I would pronounce crayon.

And as a kid, I pronounced crayon as if it was spelled C-R-A-N.

But she’s got a way of pronouncing it that I’ve never heard before.

Okay. What is it?

She always says, unless she puts a whole lot of effort and thought into it first,

It tends to spell out as crown, as in King Arthur.

Crown.

Crown.

So hand me the purple crown.

I want to color this picture.

Exactly.

Or since she’s, like I said, she’s an elementary school art teacher.

So it tends to come up a lot.

Yeah, I guess so.

And so you’re from, are you from Dallas?

Actually, she is from Houston.

And I was originally raised in Portland, Oregon.

So we’ve got a few of those little differences.

But this is one that I can’t take down as far as a southern thing or anything like that.

I’ve even asked her mother about it, and she’s got no idea where it came from.

Well, we have in American English four or five different pronunciations of the word C-R-A-Y-O-N.

We do, indeed.

Yeah, and it’s super interesting.

Crayon is the most common one.

It’s the one that you’ll find listed first in any good dictionary.

Yeah, as far as spelled, I mean, that seems like it makes the most sense.

Yeah, you know, you say that, but English is a tricky little one.

I was going to actually call it names, but English is misleading.

Don’t call English names.

But there are a lot of really crazy pronunciations.

Not crazy.

They’re perfectly fine, but they’re dialect pronunciations,

And they conform to geographic boundaries

And historical kind of pathways of getting people to a new place.

So some people say crann.

Some people say crayon.

Some people say cray-on, and some people say crown.

Really?

Yeah.

This is a real thing?

It’s a real thing.

Yeah, it’s not just your wife.

Yeah.

That’s kind of what I wanted to hear because, I mean, she’s been a little bit, I don’t know, embarrassed is too strong a word for it.

But she tends to, nowadays, she tends to go with colors instead of crayons.

She avoids the word completely.

She does.

Which I’m sad because I don’t want to lose it.

I think it’s cute.

It’s adorable.

It’s adorable.

Yeah.

And it’s not, it’s one of those things that’s really hard to get your mind.

If you don’t say it, it’s hard to get your mind around it.

If you say crayon and you hear somebody say crown, it just sounds plain wrong.

And you kind of are frustrated and flustered and like just can’t get your mind to it for a minute.

But I love your approach, Kit, to think of it as durable first is a great first step to accepting it and going, okay, I need information.

Who else does this and why?

Right?

Yeah, exactly.

So we don’t know why.

But we don’t know why.

But it does tend to be what’s called a Midlands pronunciation.

This throughout the middle of the United States, let’s say the northern part of the south and the southern part of the north,

Kind of along the Ohio River Valley down into Kentucky and Tennessee and across to Missouri.

And there are speckles of people who pronounce it this way in Texas.

In fact, Kit, we can put a link on our website to a fabulous dialect map that will show those different pronunciations,

The four that Grant talked about, and then there’s a miscellany.

There are different pronunciations beyond those.

But you can see exactly on this dialect map where crown is distributed for crayon.

Awesome.

Or I say crayon.

Do you say crayon?

I say crayon.

Crayon, yeah.

Crayon, yeah.

Yeah.

At least I think I do.

It’s one of those things where when you try to say it right, you do,

And then when you’re not thinking about it, you might say something else.

So, Kit, were her children correcting her in class,

Or was she having conversations with other parents?

No, I don’t know if it had as much to do with the kids

As it had to do with probably the other teachers

And something like that.

And also, it just kind of became within herself,

Because she became really aware of it, you know?

Well, it is a tough question, right?

Because if you know that it affects people that way,

Because pronunciation is really, really personal.

And if you’ve heard a word all your life one way

And then you hear somebody else saying it a different way,

That can be really irritating, you know?

So I can see why she might, you know, bite her tongue a little bit.

Right, right.

You might be self-conscious because being in front of a classroom is a little bit of a performance.

And so you start to think about the influence that you’re having on this audience, these kids, and maybe it makes you second-guess yourself.

Yeah.

Thanks for calling.

All right.

Thanks, guys.

Take care.

Bye, kid.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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