Pronouncing the Veep’s Name
Slate‘s Scaachi Koul wants you to know “You’re Still Saying Kamala Harris’ Name Wrong.” Her setup is familiar:
For most of my life, as is true for a lot of Indians, no one in my family used my real name. Instead, I was called by a nickname too stupid to even tell white people about it. Most members of my family have their own pet name: My mother used to go by Moni, my niece is Bubaloo, I have Pinky Aunties and Sweetu Didis and Bubbly Uncles. You probably know some of these nicknames without even realizing it—Nimarata “Nikki” Haley has been going by a family nickname for most of her public life.
We’ve all known folks whose name is very hard to pronounce in English who adopt one-syllable names for ease: “My name is Yeong-Hwan but you can call me Sam.” Indeed, my kids have teachers with relatively easy last names who go by “Mr. S” or “Miss K” for simplicity.
This is a time-honored tradition among brown folks, but it also leads to some confusion later in life. Sometimes you find out that the cousin you were raised with actually has an entirely different, utterly unpronounceable name. There you are, trying to ask your mom about “Pippoo” or whatever, and your mother replies with “Who? Oh, Veerangana,” and you have to spend the next day mentally reformatting your family tree while trying to figure out how many A’s are in “Veerangana.”
Which, presumably, is why Nikki Haley still goes by Nikki. It’s just easier. And, indeed, she may well not think of herself as Nimarata.
Anyway, that’s a long setup for the crux:
Who knows if presidential candidate (and fellow South Asian) Kamala Harris was raised the same way I was, with everyone having a stupider, faker name than their real one. In the public consciousness, at least, Harris has had plenty of names: Laffin’ Kamala , Veep , Brat , Momala (my personal favorite), and, maybe eventually , Madam President. But through it all is one clear constant, already a thorn in the sides of a lot of brown people across the world: Even when you think you’re saying Harris’ first name right, you’re still saying it wrong. And she’s letting us!
For once, I don’t blame white people for this. In 2016, while she was running for the Senate, Harris released a PSA to help people learn how to say her name. “It’s not Cam-el-uh. It’s not Kuh-ma-la. It’s not Karmela,” say a rotation of cutie-pie kids. “It’s Kamala.” For years, Harris has been telling people her name is pronounced “comma-la, like the punctuation mark.” It’s common, for people with unique ethnic names, to find ways to explain the pronunciation approachably and easily. I’ve been doing this for years, so much so that in my mid-20s, I realized I had been saying my own name wrong for most of my life. Sometimes it’s just easier to agree with the pronunciation that most people can get their heads around. It’s tiring to spend your life explaining your most basic self; Harris first had to get people to even recognize the basics of her name.
Indeed, until well into her failed run for the 2020 nomination, I had always mentally pronounced her name “kuh-MA-la.” I had seldom heard it pronounced and that’s what I intuited from reading it. And, for some reason, I had the impression for a while after that this it was actually pronounced “CAM-el-uh.” I only recently shifted to “COMMA-luh.”
And now I’m supposed to change again?!
Apparently:
And yet her pronunciation still rings false for anyone raised with South Asian family members. It’s not “comma-la.” It never was! Kamala, among Indians, is a pretty common name for girls. It means “lotus” and is often used with some interchangeability for Lakshmi, one of the chief goddesses in Hinduism. But it’s never pronounced “comma-la”; instead, it’s more subtle, closer to “com’la.” The emphasis isn’t on the first part, “comma”; instead, there isn’t any real emphasis at all. It’s smooth sailing, across her full name. It can be tough for tongues trained in English, but you almost have to skip gently over that second a—not entirely, but just enough so that it doesn’t sound as if you’re speaking in punctuation.
Appropriate emphasis in South Asian names continues to be tough for North American audiences. Usha Vance is lucky her first name is so simple; her son Vivek will continue to have his name mildly butchered while his dad rails against women who own cats . (What did we ever do to you?) But again, who can blame everyone for getting it wrong when the candidate herself isn’t quite getting it either? If I’m being fully honest with myself, even my own explanation is lacking: Hindi doesn’t use Western pronunciations of the letters a and o, meaning they sometimes operate either more as a u sound (as in pagal) or as an au sound (as in chodah). In this case, we’d be better off pronouncing her name more like “Cum’la,” but I know better than to suggest that spelling. I too was once 12 years old.
Honestly, “COM-luh” doesn’t strike me as particularly challenging. Neither does “CUM-luh,” for that matter, aside from misogynistic jokes it would invite.
To the extent one of those variants doesn’t exactly replicate the way the name would be pronounced by a native speaker, however, that should surely be forgiven. As I noted fifteen years ago, when Sonia Sotomayor was nominated to the Supreme Court, pronouncing ‘foreign’ names should come with mutual respect. We should absolutely strive to pronounce them correctly but native speakers should also understand that those raised in a different language are only going to come so close.