I happened upon a podcast recently where there was a discussion about the “correct” or “right” pronunciation of Ibiza (discussed here three years ago). There were two key points for language learning and linguistics emerging from it.
The three gentlemen on the podcast had been told that their pronunciation, roughly “Eye-bee-tha“, was “wrong”. With regard to what was “wrong” about it, they discussed at length the final syllable, which they had been told was pronounced by Dutch people as “-tsa” rather than “-tha“. They nevertheless established that in fact “Spanish people” do pronounce it “-tha“, and thus determined that in fact their pronunciation was “right”. Well… there were two key points for language learning and linguistics emerging from this…
First is the obvious issue from the title of this post: who determines what is “right” and “wrong”? It had not occurred to the three gentlemen (and nor should it, by the way, as none of them was claiming linguistic competence) that there is no particular “right” or “wrong” here. What they were determining to be “right”, i.e. that the final syllable should be pronounced “-tha“, was specifically the pronunciation in what we can reasonably refer to as “Standard European Spanish” (hence the reference to “Spanish people”). However, of course, not all “Spanish people” speak “Standard European Spanish”; there are Spanish people, notably in the southwest, who when speaking “Spanish” nevertheless pronounce the final syllable “-sa” (and, as a direct result given that is where the boats for the New World typically departed from, this means that the overwhelming majority of Spanish speakers globally pronounce the final syllable “-sa” too). And then, of course, not all “Spanish people” speak “Spanish” at all: Catalan speakers also pronounce the final syllable closer to “-sa“, and this is highly relevant because Ibiza is of course part of the Catalan-speaking area; the focus of the podcast was entirely on attempting to replicate the Spanish-language name of the place, Ibiza, without considering the Catalan-language name of the place, Eivissa; yet in “Ibiza” itself, given that it falls within the “Catalan Lands“, signage refers to Eivissa not Ibiza. To some extent, therefore, “Ibiza” is not even the “right” spelling, so why would anyone aiming for the “right” pronunciation use it as a basis? Put more simply, in linguistics there are “good” (essentially “consistent”) and “bad” (“inconsistent”) answers, but rarely a straightforward “right” or “wrong”.
Second, however, is in some ways the more relevant issue for language learners, namely “noticing”. Even if we accept that by “right” the objective is “Standard European Spanish”, the issue with the pronunciation “Eye-bee-tha” was categorically not the final syllable. The issue was their pronunciation of the first syllable, something which, interestingly, they did not consider at all. Such was the focus on the letter ‘z’, they completely missed the first ‘i’! In “Standard European Spanish”, or indeed any version of Spanish, ‘i’ is consistently pronounced similarly to typical English “ee”, thus to replicate Spanish pronunciation we are looking for “Ee-bee-tha” (or, as an absolutely acceptable alternative, “Ee-bee-sa“) but certainly not something beginning with a syllable pronounced similarly to the English word “eye”!
As an aside, we also have to accept that we are unlikely ever to be able to replicate the “native” pronunciation, whichever “natives” we may mean by that, absolutely faithfully. There is, after all, also a problem with the ‘b’ for English speakers, which is much less plosive (almost half way to a ‘v’) for most Spanish speakers; and indeed if we opt for final “-sa” this too requires the ‘s’ to be moved part of the way towards what English speakers would think of as an “-sh-” and also quietened (‘s’ in English is pronounced much more loudly than in Romance languages, something which causes learners considerable difficulty in both directions).
It so happens that the initial syllable of the Catalan name Eivissa is closer to English “eye” (though the location and duration of articulation is far from identical), but then we absolutely must have “-sa” as the final syllable and we also have to consider that although the ‘v’ is pronounced in Standard Catalan similarly to the Spanish ‘b’ in Ibiza, it is pronounced much more like English ‘v’ in the variety of Catalan spoken on the island itself.
All of this means that there are various “right” pronunciations not just for the name of the island, but actually for every single syllable of that name! However, it is important to “notice” that they cannot be randomly jumbled up – if we start with something close to “eye” then we should probably finish “-sa“, but if we are determined to finish “-tha” (noting that there is no reason for such determination in English) then the first syllable really needs to be “ee-“.
After all that, the main point is not to be too insistent on exactly what is “right” or “wrong”…!
Ian James Parsley 