Australian locations can be tricky to pronounce if you’ve never heard them before, even for interstate travellers. Think Melbourne’s Prahran, Capalaba near Brisbane and Coogee in Sydney, for starters. International visitors even mispronounce capital cities like Melbourne and Brisbane. Here’s the top 20 Aussie place names that visitors frequently get wrong.
US online language learning platform Preply used Google search data to determine the most mispronounced Aussie place names and ranked them based on pronunciation difficulty.
Topping the list was Tropical North Queensland city Cairns with an average of 31,480 people searching for pronunciation guidance each year.
The city’s correct pronunciation is ‘cans’ with a silent ‘r’ however, it’s often incorrectly referred to as ‘kens’, ‘kahn’ (Cannes), or ‘kerns’.
Funnily enough, there’s an annual APAC festival of creativity that makes light of this fact – Cannes in Cairns!
Also in the top five list of the most mispronounced Aussie place names are Prahran (2) – the bane of every Melburnian who has to endure the mangled suburb moniker, Melbourne itself (3), Launceston (4) and Gloucester in NSW (5).
Rounding out the top 10 are Canberra (6); Balmain (7) – the Sydney suburb, not the luxury French brand, darling; Ngunnawal (8); Warwick (9) and Derby (10) – ‘der-by’ using US instead of UK pronunciation.
Brisbane (not ‘Bris-bane’) also got a look in at number 12 as did Bondi Beach (who even says ‘Bon-dee’?) in 16th place.
Some Indigenous place names such as Uluru (13), Coogee (14), Ngunnawal and Kata Tjuta (18) are undoubtedly foreign for international travellers who have never heard these words.
But with more uptake of traditional place names (thanks Australia Post!) and digital additions of Acknowledgement of Country there will hopefully be more widespread knowledge of First Nations culture – and pronunciation – worldwide.
Read the full list and correct pronunciations here.
