Culture

‘NPR’ Say You Can Pronounce ‘Emu’ Like ‘Ee-Moo’, And Australians Are Exceedingly Angry

That's a lot of emotion.

by Jared Richards  24 August 2020
NPR emu

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Pedantic Australians on Twitter are currently experiencing a melt-down over the US radio network NPR determining that it’s acceptable to pronounce Emu as ‘Ee-Moo’.

NPR Audio Engineer Stu Rushfield was seemingly unaware of the flames he was playing with when he Tweeted out the decision, gloating over his victory.

“After discussions with editors &the NPR RAD team (Research, Archives & Data), the ruling is that ee-moo wins!!,” he wrote.

“The OED’s pronunciation favors ee-mew, this is one of the common words for which NPR doesn’t have a standard pronunciation for, & ee-moo is acceptable.”

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This, naturally, prompted a lot of emotional reactions from Australians unwilling to accept that Americans might pronounce the word ‘Emu’ differently from us.

“It’s a national Australian animal on the Australian coat of arms and so Australians get to choose the pronunciation of the word,” wrote one Tweeter.

“It’s Em-mew. P.S. Your research team sucks if they decided em-moo was acceptable. Show some respect. I expect MUCH better of NPR.”

Rushfield was immediately Ratio’d — aka, his Tweet inspired many more angry responses than likes.

The ruling was called everything from a “denial of reality” to something straight out of Fox and Friends‘ playbook, while others criticised NPR‘s decision to consult the Oxford English Dictionary instead of the Macquarie, given it’s an “Australian word”.

Which it isn’t. Despite what you may think, the word ‘Emu’ actually has more links to Portuguese than English or any Indigenous language. It’s likely a riff off the Portuguese word ’ema’, another word for the Emu-like Rhea birds found across South America.

Regardless, a lot of Australians remain very angry. Really angry.

Some are now calling for Aussies to mispronounce American animal names on purpose, such as “Bald E-Girl” for a Bald Eagle, or declaring that this level of arrogance is exactly why Trump is president.

For the record, Australia’s de-facto pronunciation expert Tiger Webb, the chair of the ABC’s English language use committee, doesn’t think NPR‘s in the wrong here.

“As the chair of an Australian public broadcaster’s English usage committee, I can unreservedly say that Americans are free to pronounce “emu” with or without a palatal consonant: /ˈimju/ or /ˈimu/,” he wrote on Twitter.

He then went on to explain his argument by describing the process of ‘yod dropping’ in spoken English. In short, it’s exactly why that ‘u’ sound at the end of a ‘traditional’ pronunciation of ‘Emu’ shifts into ‘Ee-Moo’, offering another example of how many Americans pronounce ‘music’ as ‘moo-zik’. You might not like it, but that’s how language works, baby.

You can read Webb’s full thread here.

Regardless of how you feel about ‘Ee-moo’, the important thing is that people are talking about emus, which is, as always, an opportunity to bring up that time the Australian army lost a war against emus.

Feature image via WikiMedia/Shebalso, used under CC BY-SA 2.0.