Pronouncing Coyote

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sheila from Billings, Montana.

Hello, Sheila. Welcome.

What would you like to talk with us about?

Well, my husband and I both grew up in Colorado, and everyone that we knew pronounced C-O-Y-O-T-E as coyote. And this, we now live in Montana, and this seems to be true throughout a lot of Montana and Wyoming as well. We all say coyote.

But both our kids moved back east, and we’ve noticed that elsewhere in the United States, a lot of people seem to say coyote instead. So we wondered if saying coyote was some sort of Western regional dialect, and if so, how that came about.

Yeah, bingo. Exactly right. It is a common pronunciation of the word C-O-Y-O-T-E in the mountain states and in the Southwest and in the West in general of the United States. If you look in dictionaries from 100 or 150 years ago, all of them have the two-syllable pronunciation as the standard pronunciation. It is not until later that the three-syllable pronunciation comes into play. And there’s a reason for this.

It’s a classic story of how we learn words. Whole parts of this country only know the coyote from reading. And so they looked at the word, they figured it was some kind of foreign word, probably Spanish, and then they pronounced it that way. So you have these two diverging paths of pronunciation.

But in the West, historically, as I understand it, Americans from the earliest days picked the word up, not from Spanish speakers, but from Native Americans.

Oh, really?

Yes, and in their language, the word comes to us from Nahuatl, which is a Mexican language. And it’s C-O-Y-O-T-L. And it is more or less two syllables.

The L, I believe, is very liquid.

So it’s coyoto, something like that.

And so it sounds more like coyote than it does coyote or coyote or any of the other various pronunciations that people have invented for themselves.

And so in the West, the word comes into English from a Native American language where it is very similar to coyote.

It is a natural, normal pronunciation.

It’s not an affectation.

It’s not anything that means that they’re uneducated or anything like that.

It is a part of the dialect of the West.

And as a matter of fact, if you and I met Sheila, let’s say, at a business conference somewhere and I wanted to figure out where you were from, one of the standard questions I might ask you is how you pronounce that word.

And then I could divide the country right down the middle and assume that if you said coyote that you were from the West.

And so in California, they tend to say coyote also.

Oh, you know, obviously this is a country with a lot of migration and a lot of weird patterns of people from elsewhere, particularly in the military towns and in the industrial.

Towns and that sort of thing. But in general, people who’ve been here for a generation or too, and they have strong roots in the West, and definitely in Colorado. It’s great that you’re from Colorado because that is the heart of it. Coyote is nearly universal. People know the coyote pronunciation from television and movies, but it’s not part of their natural vocabulary.

Yeah, I was going to say Wile E. Coyote probably influenced a generation, right?

Yeah, definitely.

Those Roadrunner cartoons.

Yeah, definitely. So to summarize, Sheila, the coyote pronunciation is fine. It is the older pronunciation in American English. It probably comes from the Mesoamerican Nahuatl language, spoken still in Mexico, and the coyote pronunciation is also fine. It just happens to be newer and probably descended from a different pronunciation tree.

Great. Thank you so much.

Sure. Our pleasure.

Thanks for calling, Sheila.

Thank you.

Bye-bye, Sheila.

Bye-bye.

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