BITING NYers’ TONGUE

Menu phobia

New Yorkers are so afraid of choking on their own words that they avoid ordering hard-to-pronounce dishes at restaurants, a survey of city waiters reveals.

French cuisine left the worst taste in customers’ mouths, with 44 percent of restaurant staffers reporting it as the most avoided item on the menu, according to the study by the language-learning app Babbel.

Tongue-twisting delicacies such as “mille-feuille” (a creamy French pastry) and“c as soul et ”( aka casserole) were the hardest for New Yorkers to say.

They also had trouble wrapping their mouths around “Beaujolais,” a lightbodied red wine from central France.

One Paris-to-New York transplant blamed her homeland’s food snobbery for Americans’ apparent timidity.

“I blame the French for it!” Emma Rivera, 49, who was eating at Marseille in Midtown. “We make everyone too self-conscious about how they speak our language.”

Italian food was ranked the second most likely to scare off diners, with 22 percent of waiters saying customers avoid it like a rotten cioppino.

For the study, Babbel teamed with the New York City Hospitality Alliance to survey more than 100 people at 30 restaurants and bars across the city.

Among them were Ardesia Wine Bar in Hell’s Kitchen; Caracas Arepa Bar, a Venezuelan restaurant with locations in Brooklyn and Queens; and Noreetuh, a Hawaiian restaurant in the East Village, said company spokesman Nicholas Baines.

Overall, 41 percent of the eatery workers said they had seen diners refuse to order menu items for fear of mispronouncing them.

The Babbel app allows diners to snap photos of dishes they can’t pronounce. It then sends a free audio file with the dish’s proper pronunciation.

“Not knowing a language can be an impediment to fully experiencing a trip abroad, but it can also even prevent you from getting the most out of a meal in NYC,” said Julie Hansen, the Berlin-based company’s US CEO.