Europeans Try to Pronounce the Hardest British City Names!

[@liukin95]

I live not far from Beaulieu and the Swedish girl actually got it spot on!

[@stylishartichoke]

It’s funny the Swedish got it bang on and British got it wrong

[@liukin95]

@@stylishartichoke To be honest, it's a very small and a bit of an unknown place so unless you live near it, you're not going to know how it's pronounced. But yeah the Swedish girl getting it right was impressive!

[@ItzDenholm]

@@liukin95 Swedish people are familiar with English and the silent letters than most other non natives so I was quite happy she represented it well

[@HenrikJansson78]

Could you please skip the background music? I stopped watching after 3-4 minutes since it was too distracting. I'm pretty sure I would have loved the video otherwise...

[@andyx6827]

It's an abomination that these people even make money with such horribly bad videos :D The sound is often abysmal, the subtitles are always ridiculous, the titles are always incorrect, even the content ideas are mostly stolen from other famous videos on yt, tiktok or insta. I love the videos because of the cool guests, but the production team really needs to step up their game.

[@oliski7019]

Yea lol. It's too loud. I couldn't properly hear how the names of some of the towns were said because of the music.

[@Freakyman403]

4:14 what she also forgot to mention is that names were also influenced by the french, roman and even nordic cultures.

[@dave_h_8742]

Invaders

[@L4NTZEN]

@@dave_h_8742 People living in UK now are mostly "invader" genetics

[@dwsoccer6859]

OK, so the English girl got the first syllable of Beaulieu wrong. The Swedish girl actually got the whole thing right. The IPA spelling would be /ˈbjuːli/ She also got the second syllable of Ruislip wrong - it's pronounced the same as the word "slip". IPA is /ˈraɪslɪp/ Lastly, she got Quernmore wrong as well - it's "Kwormer". IPA spelling is /ˈkwɔːmər/

[@the.halodoctor]

I was gonna mention beaulieu. British gal got it wrong

[@sophieking7508]

Ha ha, yes she did a good job but I was shouting ‘Bew-lea’ at the screen!

[@traceyg6458]

​@@sophieking7508 Me too!

[@jeanb3872]

It would help if the Brit knew that Aberystwyth was in Wales and that the Welsh language is different from English.

[@dave_h_8742]

Map men covered it so much better breaking Aber istwith up into it's component parts and their meaning. Sorry but the English girl was rubbish.

[@gracegreen1859]

Did you not watch the video? She literally said it’s mix of different countries and influences.

[@maartenvandersteen5134]

The music in this video made it really hard to hear them at times, especially when the british lady was giving the correct pronunciations cause she already speaks very quietly.

[@emiliya1377]

the background music the background music !!!! damn

[@module79l28]

I know, right????

[@t.a.k.palfrey3882]

It's a disaster when the (supposedly) English woman doesn't know how Beaulieu in Hampshire is pronounced locally. It's "bew-ley".

[@NotesOfBoredom]

Well, listen to her accent....it's strange not quite completely oop north like some of the vowels suggest..

[@NotesOfBoredom]

At times it sounds like there's a bit of ...another accent - Iike Irish mixed in and she's young - that's not a disparaging remark - you don't know the pronunciation of some things - until you do.. I come from the Lake District and the number of people who can't say Scafell correctly or Sandwith or when I lived in the south - Bicester etc... now I live in Italy and teach English so you know the pronunciation can be a tad important 😅

[@Cassxowary]

nah it’s more of a disaster that you judge someone while contradicting yourself…

[@jp16k92]

There are reasons for the skipping of syllables, mostly everyday use and history. Some of these names come from Old English and had different spelling.

[@applecider7307]

The different ways of pronouncing the cities is the influence of the Scandanavian during Danelaw, Celtic, Anglo Saxon and French

[@herrbonk3635]

Yes, but that goes for the whole English language, doesn't it? Not just place names.

[@actionalex3611]

@@herrbonk3635 Like London comes from the roman empire Londonium i think. Maybe thats why France and Belgium say it different for example

[@actionalex3611]

@@herrbonk3635 Yes. And i think i read somewhere that the most part of english is influenced/comes from old norse.

[@Carloefrancese]

2:44 With Max, "Gloucester" becomes "GLUE SISTER" 😂😂😂

[@maximebalian5772]

Oh yeah indeed 😂✨

[@stuartfitch7093]

British english can be very hard to learn for anyone who is not British because even today it's place name pronunciations for example are affected by our long history, all the different invasions and different people who came here with their own languages affected our language from the Scots and picts, the Romans, the Anglo Saxons, the Vikings, the Normans etc. the British English we speak is an amalgamation of them all. This is why even people who live in countries that supposedly speak English as their national language such as the US, come to the UK and mispronounce UK place names. This is because is in US english they do not have silent letters. Thet pronounce it as they see it. A good KZbin video on thus subject is "why uk place names so hard to pronounce" by map men.

[@reineh3477]

That doesn't explain the difference, Saxons, Romans... all came to England 100s of years before Columbus came to America. But yes, English is a mess, both spelling and pronunciation can be confusing.

[@WijaLE]

The Swedish woman said Beaulieu exactly like how it's said in English

[@aylietv274]

Hey hey! It’s me Ania (Aylie) it was so fun to film the video with you! ❤️

[@dave_h_8742]

Map men did it better than the English girl. You were on a difficult course with this one 100% bound to get them wrong (even she did )

[@Rhianalanthula]

Influence from invasions - Roman, Anglo-Saxon, viking, Norman - then a vowel shift, then contracting them but not changing spelling. She should have watched Map Men on this first.

[@ellav5387]

3:38 Jesus christ that sounded exactly like my doorbell and had to listen to that part three times to make sure nobody was at my door lmao

[@vialactea9120]

Even the English girl gets Quernmore wrong. When I hear the people around there say it, it sounds like "Kormah".

[@nathalielf1338]

Très belle et souriante équipe 👏 Max toujours aussi élégant 🇫🇷 Pas évident la prononciation de ces villes😅 Vous pouvez changer de musique la prochaine fois 😉 mais merci à tous pour ce moment d'apprentissage 👍

[@maximebalian5772]

Merci beaucoup 🙏🏻✨

[@afjo972]

No matter how weird the spelling is, everything sounds lovely with a British accent

[@rebeccaestrada9141]

Love the pronunciations of all these cities using proper pronunciation. Please remove loud music tracks! They are so distracting and make it hard to hear the pronunciations!

[@Ramtamtama]

Frome is the town in English with the most often mispronounced name. Unlike a lot of other places which have their roots in Norse, Saxon, or French, Frome is Brythonic. It describes the speed of the River Frome (brisk). F1 champion Jenson Button is from Frome, so that might make it easier to remember Frome is pronounced like zoom.

[@EddieReischl]

That's cool to know. I was wondering if maybe it started out as Fröme, and the umlaut got dropped, but the pronunciation kind of stayed the same.

[@michaelrespicio5683]

Awesome! Hanna's back~! 😄

[@thedeadman82988]

Hi ayliee!! Welcome back

[@shelleyphilcox4743]

Some of pur place names could be pronounced several ways, and really its locals who know and everyone else would guess wrongly! Our names are often quite ancient with roots in either Brythonic, Gaelic, Danish, Norse, French, or German language, and time has also changed our language and pronunciation, hence some place names being more obscure to pronounce now. Have a best guess, most of us do, and locals will either chuckle and correct you or politely ignore your pronunciation faux pas. No one will be offended.

[@SS501Fan101]

Yeah the last one was Welsh and that's not even a long city name compared to so many others

[@ChrisCrossClash]

Yeah they should have done Llanfairpwllgwyngyll 😂

[@Cassxowary]

@@ChrisCrossClashllanfair would’ve been funny 😂

[@Merro959]

Aberystwyth is in Wales. Welsh relies heavily on Y as a vowel similar to I pronunciation

[@PaulReinerfelt]

That one I would have gotten right (as a non-native), if only because I remember a limerick with it and knows it should rhyme with "grist with"…

[@johnlbirch]

No always! "Y" is the one letter in Welsh that can have two slightly different sounds - "i" or "u". The river Ystwyth, for example, starts with the Y making an "u" sound, but the second Y makes an "i" sound.

[@julius9055]

Not sure what's confusing about Aberystwth, it's pronounced phonetically.

[@johnlbirch]

Which is true - ALL Welsh placenames are entirely phonetic... if you know Welsh! Though for Aberystwyth the first y can be pronounced "u" or "i, while the river Ystwyth always starts with the the "u" sound. What makes it even more odd about the town is that Aberystwyth is not on the river Ystwyth at all - its on the river Rheidol.

[@jjjez]

Wait until you see Chichester. In the south the town is Chich-ister. But there’s a place near Newcastle where it’s called Chy-Chester

[@lewistaylor1965]

'Lympne'....in Kent.....I use to play an online Battle of Britain flight sim....Lympne is in Kent where the battle took place so sim pilots needed to tell others where they were and Lympne was a place name spoken on comms frequently and everyone pronounced it differently, even the Brits.......I was so confused I rang up a pub in Lympne to find out how it was pronounced...It's pronounce...'Lim'....The bar staff were amused that I'd rang them

[@johnlbirch]

Quernmore - near Lancaster - is pronounced locally "Qu-or-mer", not whatever the Englishwoman in the video said. But there are no rules. I know of three villages called "Claughton" in the North West, but all are pronounced differently. Any placename with "ugh" in it will always be total guesswork.

[@wolfie854]

Reading is not a city. It is a town which has not yet been granted city status.

[@jillp1840]

Fun fact (I used this in a recent pub quiz). Reading is the largest town in England that isn't a city.

[@EddieReischl]

My stepmother was British, and the only one I was up on was the "cester" deal. Then again, I live near Waupaca, Wisconsin. These two names are a best guess how to spell in English Native American sounding names for places, and our pronunciation of them now is probably anathema to Native American ears.

[@hahhsshs]

pronunciation of country names in Indonesian....! 1.france(Perancis) 2.Poland(Polandia) 3.Sweden(Swedia) 4.Belgium(Belgia) 5.German(Jerman)

[@yannrousseau5437]

France=Perancis ??? Wtf ! 😂

[@cpnlsn88]

When the English participant says 'we pronounce it...' then gets it wrong what hope do the pthers have? (Couldn't someone have told her the correct pronunciations before going to air?). Adittedly some names are obscure if you've not encountered them, Leicester, Gloucester and Loughborough as well as Edinbourgh and the stress patterns for Nottingham, are perhaps easier to work with.

[@jerry2357]

They should have included Slaithwaite, pronounced Slawit. Welsh pronunciation is very phonetic when you know the code. Aberystwyth is not difficult if you know that y is a vowel.

[@poseiidon2029]

I was wondering if my town Alnwick would be on here and it was haha

[@jamescook7796]

Even if you are British, unless you hear town names spoken first, you’ll get them really wrong just from reading

[@rp1692]

Yes. There are plenty of Brits who wouldn't know how to pronounce Beaulieu or Frome. Give the foreigners a break!

[@lynnejamieson2063]

There was no real point to this when the person who is meant to be giving information has none to give…and doesn’t always get the pronunciations correct themselves. They didn’t know about the Norman, Roman, French and Germanic (amongst others) influences on the English language, as well as the vowel shift that happened to English a few centuries ago. They also completely disregarded the Welsh spelling to pronunciation as just being a bit weird instead of the fact that it is a different language…let alone that it’s one of the oldest continuously spoken languages in the world.

[@markwalker2627]

Next time can we have an English native speaker who knows how to pronounce properly and also with knowledge please

[@eagleswings159]

Hee new series ...next, German or Sweden cities?

[@charliecroker7380]

Try Trottiscliffe, which is pronounced Trosley.

[@SinilkMudilaSama]

English's speeches pranks 😅😅😅😅😅😅

[@charliecroker7380]

….unless it’s Cirencester.

[@corpsecoder_nw6746]

Meanwhile the Welsh: *laughs in llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch*

[@lothariobazaroff3333]

8:57 How can she say that the first part (i.e. pronunciation of "Aber") doesn't make any sense? That's exactly how "aber" would be pronounced in Polish, with rolled R. BTW first and sometimes also second Y in multisyllabic words (e.g. in YSBYTY - "hospital") is pronounced in Welsh as schwa (ə = short "e"), while the final occurrence of Y sounds like "i" in "tin" (or perhaps even like "ee" in "teen").

[@TuaTeMauAkauAtea]

This video is beautiful, practical, deep, true and very real, which must be understood and respected in detail. English has this heavy Parisian, Norman, mountain and Arpitan heritage of initial and middle letters, silent in speech that are skipped, this linguistic and grammatical rule is copied from French and the other Romance languages mentioned above. Note that the other Romance languages do not behave like this, they are not tonal or musical and do not have silent median and initial consonants and vowels in an intense way in orality, this English rule is the mirror of the French rule. And when British natives say assertively and correctly that English is Romance, it is precisely because of these normative oral and phonetic qualities inherited from the Neo-Latin languages of France. The funniest of these silent vowels and consonants you see in Romansh and Piedmontese, which are Neo-Latin, in these details you see the heavy French linguistic engineering within English and how the British raised it to a high level of difficulty that only they know how to speak the words and many even don't know how to speak and forget the rules and figure out how to speak while laughing too, that's pure Romance linguistics. Root Germanic orality does not have this non-musicality, tonality and silence 🤫 as English has, exclusive Neo-Latin qualities of speech. This is what sets the whole video apart. 💎💙🫂💎💙🫂💎💙🫂💎💙🫂🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶 Love it.

[@dave_h_8742]

Jay Forman Map Men on the origins of place names from different invasions not just from the UK as the girl said at Forme 4:22

[@davewalker6760]

Loughborough is fun

[@jpvdw70]

ok, Belgian girls says she is from Namur and a picture of Dinant is showed ... 🤔

[@pjkr123]

If you cannot pronounce Leicester or Reading, you're not a Premier League fan XD

[@hadz8671]

It's a while since Reading were in the Premier League. Also confusing since "reading" is a common word and is pronounced differently.

[@Cassxowary]

or they can be but fans of other teams

[@littlechris5656]

it would be more useful if the English speaker new the origin of the words came from because that often influenced why it's pronounced the way it is!

[@herrbonk3635]

8:58 _The first part doesn't make any sense"_ Really? To a swede like me, the English lady said _Aberystwyth_ more or less like it's spelled.

[@bouli3576]

When the Belgian girl presents herself and says she's from Namur, why show a picture of Dinant, some 30 km up the river ?

[@Nishat_82]

Too sister 😂😂

[@Siansonea]

The sound levels on this video are not great. Sometimes the music is louder than the speakers. When you're trying to hear nuances of pronunciation, that's a problem.

[@legendofmirr]

Maybe you should get someone that actually knows why these things are the way they are just makes us sound like idiots. Theres actually a rich history behind it that involves some of these peoples ancestors tbh. sad

[@jhb2580]

You really should've done Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

[@nekroix]

Spanish, Italian or Portuguese missing tbh, Belgique et France???? Nonsense same language, français 🤷🏻‍♂️, if only she was dutch...

[@clauchinaski]

it always stands out how plain europeans are vs this interviews with latins, where nobody would let other speak haha nice one though

[@module79l28]

I'm assuming that by "latins" you mean a certain brazilian girl...

[@zoom5024]

Mm it's almost as if we are on different continents 😂

[@NickB-zc2kq]

You missed a good one... Wolfardisworthy is pronounced "Woolzery"

[@RockyRhino24]

Beaulieu is not pronounced the way she said lmao, it’s b-U-lee

[@bastet9994]

This is breaking my head. I have watched a lot of videos, and it never fails, there is always someone going with "chester" trying to pronounce a name with "cester" in it. Even in real life, I know ppl do this. WHY? "C" is never "CH" in english. And just to make it all more mysterious to me, there is a video of BRITISH students trying to pronounce one of these words that they didn't know, and more than one went with "chester"

[@lieselmeminger267]

Ayliee? I thought, she was Anna or Anya. 🤔

[@idoltrash2353]

This would have been a much better video if the british girl actually knew anything about the history of the english language and place names

[@elemar5]

Google is your enemy young lady.

[@pyejammiesfanfic640]

She's a Northerner so I don't pronounce London quite the same as she does. I hadn't heard of some of those places so didn't have a clue how to pronounce them. Ruislip is quite near to me so I knew that one. We don't slur the. 'i' it is pronounced clearly. So it's Righslip not Righslup as she said. Now try saying this one, Llangyfelach! It's Welsh (I'm from Wales) so good luck and it isn't the hardest one by a long way. At least in Welsh we pronounce all the letters clearly. Try Machynlleth and Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgorgerechwyrndropwyllllantisiliogogogoch! I learnt the last one in school by singing it. It's on the island of Anglesey.

[@tonycasey3183]

You know the meaning of the word "background" as in "background music"? Clearly not. Ditched the video halfway through because content was drowned out by it.

[@davepb5798]

Not all 'cesters are sters! Cirencester!

[@joyridgway6398]

You should watch the map men.

[@halsmarties]

Is that Alex Pereira?! 🤣

[@eagleswings159]

Brits making it easier themselves😅 ...makes sense, n sound roll off more

[@scottosborne2915]

cut out the music it was hard to hear any of the ladies speaking and it happens on every video

[@Medickgayming]

OMG ANIA

[@mattayc266]

Unfortunately English is not my strong point And im English 😂😂

[@Lixmage]

British cities??? For heaven's sake I have never even heard of some of these places.

[@marydavis5234]

Really, I’m from the New England area of the US and some of the names are pronounced the same way as the girl from England pronounces them

[@pvisit]

Pity they took a french speaking Belgian. Nearly all answers will be like what the french guy will say. Should have taken a bilingual person.

[@reineh3477]

Bilingual? She is bilingual French and English, you mean that she should have come from the Dutch speaking part.

[@eagleswings159]

Many smarts from Reading? 😅

[@Caambrinus]

Er....Cirencester?

[@eagleswings159]

Im sorry ransom?😅

[@inotoni6148]

Can Jessica also speak Hungarian? (The German girl)

[@Jearrow]

why would she speak such a hard language which is not even popular in the world ?

[@myseoullife]

I actually do speak Hungarian since I am half Hungarian

[@Freddy-privat]

The music destroys the hole video. Lower it or take it away.

[@jjjez]

Reading is not a city

[@wallythewondercorncake8657]

She doesn't even pronounce half of them right

[@firefox3187]

American’s can NOT get British place names right

[@marydavis5234]

I got them all right and I’m American and in a lot of the comments, British citizens are saying the lady from England are pronouncing them wrong and none of them are from the US