Sangwich, Sammitch, and Samwidge

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Eric Apayes. I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.

Great. What’s on your mind in terms of language?

Well, I have a question about a word that’s commonly used here in San Antonio, and that’s the word sandwich, S-A-N-G-W-I-C-H.

Sandwich for sandwich?

Right, right.

And do you pronounce it that way?

I used to pronounce it that way, but no longer pronounce it that way.

Why not?

Because I read it when I was about third grade. I saw it on the bread loaf, and I saw that it was spelled with a D instead of a G. And so I didn’t pronounce it that way after that.

Sang-wich instead of sandwich.

The word sandwich is kind of messed up anyway. I can think of four pronunciations of this word. We say sand-wich, which is standard. We say sang-wich, which you point out. We say sam-wich. And we say sandwich. Widge at the end instead of witch at the end. Sandwich. Sandwich. Oh, yeah, and sandwich without the D. Sandwich.

So why would people say sandwich?

That’s a good question, Eric. Where did you learn sandwich?

I learned sandwich from my parents, actually, and my friends also say it that way. So I’ve also heard my grandparents say sandwich as well. So just kind of here in the community in San Antonio.

There’s a really nice explanation of this word in a piece by Jack Chambers. He wrote a chapter for a book. His chapter is called Sociolinguistics of Immigration. But basically the point is he is talking about this word in particular has a cluster of consonants in it, which are really difficult for some people who aren’t native speakers of English. That’s the NDW. Being together is hard to pronounce if your original inventory of phonemes, that is your original sounds that come with your first language, don’t include those sounds.

And so my question for you is, are you part of an immigrant community?

Well, it’s kind of complicated because my family is from Texas. So before Texas was part of the United States, it was a Mexican territory. And so my family has basically stayed here in Texas, and it became the United States.

Okay.

Right.

So you have a really long history of this. I know that in the Italian-American communities in New Jersey and New York and even in parts of Canada, this particular pronunciation, sandwich, is kind of seen as an identifier of being a part of the Italian-American community. It’s one of those linguistic traits that they’ve carried on.

I also have seen some evidence that it exists in Spanish speakers, and you would not have to be a person who spoke Spanish as a first language in order to inherit, so to speak, that pronunciation from your family and your community.

So I would not be, if there are a lot, and I know in San Antonio there are a ton of people who are bilingual or who come from Spanish-speaking families, and it’s very much a bilingual community overall, isn’t it?

It is, definitely. Absolutely.

I would not be surprised. I mean, you mentioned a lot of people say this sandwich pronunciation. It is just really hard for the NDW to work together if your original language is Italian and Spanish and a couple other languages like that.

Oh, that’s pretty cool.

Yeah, right?

That makes sense.

Well, Eric, thanks so much for your question.

Thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time to reach out to me.

Sure thing.

Take care now.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Have a good day.

Bye-bye.

And so what we do when we have a word that we want to pronounce but it has sounds in it that aren’t natural to us, we improvise. We come up with something that approximates that. Look at, when you think about, imitate a French-speaking person right now, right? The cat is on the roof, right? Why do we say the instead of the? Because we’re imitating the French people coming up with that voice the, the the, right? They don’t do the the like we do. So they’re improvising. The the sound is roughly close to it. -huh. Interesting.

Sounds like a caricature.

Yeah, but I mean, it’s a really good example of how we all do that when we speak another language.

Yeah, yeah, really interesting.

We’d love to hear about your linguistic heirlooms. Call us, 877-929-9673.