By admin 
It wasn’t so much that my friend, a Brit who has lived in Los Angeles for many years, said the word “taco” differently than I do. The confounding thing was that it was difficult for him to hear the difference, and that when he could distinguish it, he insisted that his way was more correct, closer to the way a Spanish speaker would say it.
He pronounced it “tack-oh.”
“There’s something very strange going on with that particular ‘A,’” says Lynne Murphy, a lexicologist at the University of Sussex who explores the differences between British and American English on her blog, Separated by a Common Language, and further in her book, The Prodigal Tongue. The way the Brits pronounce “taco,” as well as “paella” (pie-elluh, with the English L rather than the Spanish LL), “salsa” (the first vowel rhymes with “gal,” the second with “duh”), and “Nicaragua” (nick-uh-rag-you-uh), among others, is a glaring siren of weirdness to an American ear.
What’s going on is a complex blend of tongue positioning, imperial history, code-switching, language exposure and accommodation, and an unconscious, or uncomfortably conscious, desire not to seem like you just got back from a semester abroad in Barthelona and brought with you an inability to see your friends rolling their eyes.
Spanish and English have extremely different vowel systems. English has somewhere between 15 and 20 different vowel sounds, depending on dialect and accent, plus many more that can be constructed by putting two or more of them next to each other. Take “A,” for example: in English, that could be the vowel sound in “cat,” “take,” “part,” “watch,” the first syllable in “about,” and many more. For Americans, “hand” has a different vowel sound than “cat,” but that’s not the case for Canadians. “Caught” sounds like “cot,” except when it doesn’t, most famously in New York. English speakers will also sometimes get kind of lazy and replace vowels with what’s called a “schwa,” sort of a generic vowel that sounds like “uh.” Consider the word “taken.” That last vowel might turn into a schwa, pronounced more like “take-uhn” than “take-ehn.” This could be very confusing! And it just gets more complicated when you start adding in other vowels. The words “broad” and “goat” don’t rhyme in English, for some reason, and a new speaker would have little chance of guessing the right pronunciation from the written words.
Spanish, on the other hand, is a sensible language. It has five vowels—A, E, I, O, U—which have one sound each. Always. That’s it. Even when vowels are next to each other, they don’t undergo the unpredictable transformation that they might in English. In Spanish, even vowel combinations—called diphthongs—behave themselves, perhaps compressing a bit, but not changing their fundamental character.
“In Spanish, the vowel system is very stable,” says Phillip Carter, a sociolinguist at Florida International University who studies Spanish in the United States. “There’s very low vowel variation across these dialects. What differentiates Cuban Spanish from Mexican Spanish, Castilian Spanish from Venezuelan Spanish, and so on, are the consonants.” Argentinian Spanish includes a soft “J” sound in place of the “Y” sound that double-L usually represents in words like tortilla. Cuban Spanish sometimes deletes certain sounds, especially at the ends of words, turning “buenos dias” into “buen dia.” This is the opposite of English, where consonants tend to be fairly stable, but vowels are a complete mess.
When discussing vowel sounds, linguists talk about where the tongue is positioned in the mouth: it could be front or back, and high or low. “English basically has a back and a front vowel, so it could be “ah” [as in “card”] or “agh” [as in “cat”],” says R. Mata, a professor at Western Washington University who studies sociolinguistics, Spanish linguistics, and Spanish language contact. The Brits are using the front vowel sound for “tack-oh,” while the Americans are using the back sound. So, which one is correct?
Neither, actually. The sole pronunciation of A in Spanish is considered a mid vowel, meaning that it’s somewhere in between the one used by Brits and the one used by Americans. Despite our unnecessary plethora of vowel sounds, English doesn’t have an identical mid vowel to the Spanish A. So they’re both wrong. But which one is more wrong?
One issue is that individual speakers can vary in the precise positioning of the tongue and in the sound frequencies they produce. Not every “tack-oh” is the same. But one point in the Brits’ favor is in speed. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, meaning that each syllable lasts the same amount of time. This can make spoken Spanish seem very fast to English speakers. It isn’t really; it’s more that our brains pick up on the fact that something different is happening with the rhythm, and our best guess is that it might be speed-related.
The American “tah-co” pronunciation might feel more incorrect to Brits because that “ah” is typically drawn out longer than their “tack” sound. The speed of the two syllables might be closer in the British pronunciation than the American, which could make it sound more correct because, in Spanish, the syllables are the exact same duration.
From a native Spanish speaker’s point of view, none of this really matters. For one thing, both British and American pronunciations are equally comprehensible because neither sound could realistically be applied to any other spelling. Neither “tah-co” nor “tack-oh” could be confused for, say, “tuco,” “teco,” or “toco.” “I think they both sound equally foreign,” Mata says.
English speakers, myself included, pick up on the differences between the “a” vowel sounds in the way Brits and Americans pronounce the word. But Mata says that isn’t the only, or even the biggest, giveaway. Essentially: the accent, the “incorrectness” of how non-Spanish-speakers pronounce the word “taco,” goes through the entire word.
Starting off with the first letter: In English, our “T” sound is aspirated, meaning that we release a puff of air when forming the sound. In Spanish, it’s not. There are specific measurements for how long it takes for a speaker to start making the sound of the next letter. In English, the puff for the T is so long that it sounds like a different consonant altogether; the Spanish pronunciation would sound like a “D.”
The “C” in “taco” is a reprieve from the total screw-up English speakers have made of this word. It’s basically the same for Brits, Americans, and Spanish speakers. We avoided the clean sweep!
But when we get to the “O,” we’re back to the issue we had with the A. Both Brits and Americans will pronounce this with a slight diphthong. English speakers tend to move the tongue higher in the mouth, producing something closer to “oh-ooh,” albeit compressed. For Spanish speakers, “O” has one sound: a monophthong mid vowel, which is not very common to hear in English. One exception? The upper Midwest, in states like Minnesota. You can even hear it when Minnesotans pronounce their state’s name.
As is often the case in linguistics, it’s simpler to say how the British and American pronunciations are different than to explain why they ended up this way. One of the more prevalent theories among the linguists and Anglophones I spoke to was a basic lack of exposure. The U.S. has around 41 million native Spanish speakers, and around another 12 million identifying as bilingual, according to Lighthouse Online; this is very close to the entire population of England, and doesn’t include the millions more who speak some Spanish but wouldn’t identify as bilingual. Spanish is by far the most widely taught second language in the U.S.; many states offer government services and documents in Spanish as well as English. The U.S. has massive national television, radio, and text publications in Spanish. Essentially, the average American hears a lot of Spanish in their everyday life, which, per the American superiority argument here, allows Americans to get closer to the pin. They’re simply more familiar with Spanish.
“I think most British people these days think of Spain as a place to go on holiday,” Murphy says. “The Spanish coast has various towns where it’s all fish and chips and pubs, and there are cheap flights there constantly.” Murphy says French is the most commonly taught language to English speakers in the United Kingdom, rather than Spanish.
But I think the education argument is fraught and more complex than it seems. Americans may know the Spanish pronunciation for, say, “Argentina,” but the decision to actually use the Spanish vowels, use the velar fricative (the guttural sort of “ccchh” sound that the G there represents), and properly time the syllables … for English speakers, to do all that is making a statement. “I think there also is a sort of cultural cringe about accents, and a cultural self-consciousness about pronunciation,” Murphy says.
This is a concept called language accommodation, in which speakers tend to modify the way they speak depending on the person or people they’re speaking to. Those modifications might include mirroring accents, specific references or turns of phrase, or simplifying phrasing for comprehension. But language accommodation is more than just adjusting speech to be better understood; it’s also adjusting speech to be perceived in the way you’d like to be perceived. Speaking to a potential boss in an interview? You might employ more formal, measured speech with work-specific terminology. Trying to impress someone? You might try to use longer, less common words to seem more intelligent. This even applies to bilingual speakers, who might use the Spanish pronunciation when speaking Spanish but the Anglicized pronunciation when speaking English.
With foreign words, speakers have to perform some quick calculus to figure out exactly how to pronounce them. Will I seem like a pretentious jerk? Is this the kind of person who would think I’m a pretentious jerk? Or will I seem worldly and educated? Alternately, if I go with a sort of hyper-Anglicized pronunciation, will I seem dumb? How might the person I’m talking to pronounce this word? Do I want to try to take a stab at that pronunciation, or do I want to try something else to make me seem a certain way?
“It’s happening both ways,” Mata says. “For Spanish, the foods and cultural terms, they are the access points for a lot of the loan words to come into the English language. For the other way around, if we look at English going into Spanish, it’s a lot of technology, management, marketing terminology—that’s where the loan words come in.” Mata says the situation with English words in Mexico is complicated by the fact that English is seen as a prestige language; pretentious maybe, but also potentially valuable in a work setting.
For some Americans, policing global Mexican food is a bit of a hobby. “French tacos are tacos like chicken fingers are fingers. Which is to say, they are not tacos at all,” writes Lauren Collins at The New Yorker. President Barack Obama once tweeted a judgmental take on a New York Times recipe calling for fresh peas in guacamole. In one season of Top Chef, American chef Roy Choi criticized a contestant’s al pastor, saying that he’s from Los Angeles, so he knows al pastor. The contestant, in a talking head interview, confusedly responded by noting that he’s from Mexico.
So I think there’s also a bit of ownership over Spanish-language, and specifically Mexican, food words. Hearing a Brit order a tack-oh allows for some nice warm feelings of superiority—even if it’s not, phonologically speaking, “wrong.”
It’s also, of course, easy to get all worked up about the way you pronounce a loan word when you only speak one language. Owing to its status as the world’s lingua franca, and some cultural, political, and structural impediments, nearly 80 percent of Americans are monolingual in English. “I’ll tell you my experience living in Poland is that people speak so many languages; I mean, Poles are so multilingual because the outside world doesn’t ever really learn Polish. So Poles expect to learn other European languages, and so I think they don’t bat an eye at people using loanword phonology for loanwords,” Carter says.
A word like “taco” is on its way to becoming, or is perhaps already, simply an English word. Any language’s dictionary is full of words that arrived from some other language, mutated in some way, and became not a loan word but just another word in the book. In that sense, both “tack-oh” and “tah-co” are perfectly correct.
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