How Do You Pronounce Hyundai, Anyway?

You might find this hard to believe, but Jaguar, the storied British carmaker, has been in the news a little bit recently. Yeah, really! You may just have missed it, that’s all . . .

And while automotive commentators will doubtless debate until the end of time whether the millions of hours of screen time and miles of column pixels and print verbiage are a good or a bad thing, there is one subject upon which can ALL agree—that our American colleagues, as brilliant as they are in all other endeavors, simply cannot pronounce Jaguar correctly to an English ear. 

In Coventry, West Midlands, it’s very much a “JagYooErr,” whereas, if you take a short flight over to Coventry, Rhode Island, you’ll find it’s now a “JagWarrrr” or even—oh, dear!—“JagWire.” As I watched the numerous American presenters, influencers, and YouTubers have their say on the firm’s recent rebrand, it did make me realize that George Bernard Shaw really wasn’t wrong when he said we were “two countries separated by a common language”—and seeing as he managed to make it all the way up to 1950, this issue was probably exactly what he was talking about.

Writing for an American classic insurance company as I do, I am often amazed by my stateside brethren’s impressive interpretation of many cherished car names when we talk. With rumors of Toyota bringing back its much-loved Celica range in the near future, I can look forward to chats about the new “Sellicker” and how it’s doubtless going to be a return to form. Similarly, one of my other pet automotive squeezes, the Subaru, or “SooBARoo,” is always a great go-to conversational topic. How can two such similar cultures, effectively speaking the same language, look at the identical array of vowels and consonants and arrive at such very different ways of pronouncing them? And, not that it matters in the slightest, but which of us is right?

Thankfully, in the great spirit and long tradition of Anglo-American cooperation, there are brands that we both manage to mangle our modulation of, albeit entirely differently. Here in the U.K., we can appreciate the soft-roader charms of the “HighUnDie” Tucson, but should you actually go to Tucson itself, you’ll be asking for directions to the “HunnDay” dealership. Comically, it turns out that neither of us got this one right, and the brand is currently spending a sizeable sum trying to convince both countries that it’s actually pronounced “HeeUNDay.” Good luck getting Geoff (68, retired) from Brighton to go with that as he books his in for a service. And it doesn’t matter whether that Brighton happens to be in Massachusetts, Michigan, or East Sussex.

To be clear, I’m all in favor of these great dialectical differences. Whether you’re talking about cars, or even just the materials from which they were made, it was ever thus. Just look at the age-old debate between the British “aluminium” and the American “aluminum.” Who’s right there? Well, it turns out we both were. Upon isolating the elusive element he was after in 1808, Sir Humphry Davy, a Cornish chemist and inventor, proposed the name “Alumium,” which he tweaked to “Aluminum” some four years later. Looking for a more flowery sounding word, other scholars later added the “i” for a more classical acoustic, and here we are. I’m chalking that one up as 1-0 to the Americans, though.

So, call them what you like. It really doesn’t matter. Just don’t, whatever you do, be that guy on the internet who gives people a hard time over the whole “PorschA” versus “Porsch” thing. It really doesn’t matter. If you find a purist who insists on the rising vowel at the end, just look them straight in their eye and ask them how they pronounce the name of Munich’s most legendary carmaker. Unless it’s “BayUmVay,” they’re clearly not all that bothered about linguistic purity, and like me, they can accept that, with all words and language, car brands will inevitably get colloquialised, too. Or colloquialized, even . . .

As Jaguar moves into what is undoubtedly a make-or-break moment for the brand, can we Brits and Yanks finally settle on a compromise pronunciation for this new age? We’re already there, shoulder to shoulder on the first syllable, so that’s a given. Maybe if we just truncate that middle, British “U” sound and move into the “Er” we’ve got a decent hybrid. “Jagwer,” anyone? 

Whatever either of us call it, I for one am impressed with the noise that the recent campaign generated. More people have spoken about and discussed Jagwer, as we have now rebranded it, in the last seven days than have done so in the last seven years. The brand couldn’t have done exactly what it did before, and seeing as the market that Jag always sold to is moving away and dying off anyway, this “nuclear option” is a clever, and perhaps essential, ploy. I was lucky enough to see a little glimpse of the new car, and I think now that the cover has dropped in Miami, you’ll see a lot of journalists performing a fairly swift U-turn. Just remember that “boot” and “bonnet” are not up for discussion in your reviews, guys. You just don’t get a hood and trunk on a British car. Even ones made from aluminum.