But my more intriguing answer is that it may have something to do with the fact that most Americans going through Qatar are military personnel. My disappointing answer is this: I'm not sure. It's a nice example of follow-the-leader linguistics.īut why is the dominant American pronunciation of Qatar → to begin with? It's a nice "proximate cause" question. So why do so many Americans use this non-standard, may I say, deviant, pronunciation? First, I suspect that the soldiers and sports announcers flowing through the region have little confidence in their own default reading of the Romanized letters, so they willingly mimic whomesoever says the name first, and then, heck, that's how you say it. If I were presented with the string of Romanized letters Q-a-t-a-r for the first time, I think my first attempt at a pronunciation would be somewhat closer to American English guitar, something like **. As a native speaker of American English, I don't think my default pronunciation assignment of the alphabetic string Q-a-t-a-r would be.
This is particularly true of US military personnel serving in Iraq who are regularly traveling through there, but I also just heard it on teevee by ESPN's Chris Fowler referencing a tennis tournament in Doha, Qatar. I've noticed a lot of Americans pronouncing the country name Qatar as something like kutter* (). UPDATE: Fivethirtyeight recently () tweeted about ESPN broadcasters pronouncing Qatar and linked to this site with variations, neither of which rhyme with butter, hehe:.
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