Ee-moo?! NPR’s ‘absurd’ pronunciation starts new emu war in Australia
In 1932 Australia engaged in the historic emu wars, where a small military brigade armed with two machineguns faced off against 20,000 emus. This battle was violent, furious and ultimately fruitless.
The emu war of 2020 is different but no less dire. It is a war of words … well one word.
The first shot was fired by National Public Radio in the US when it ruled on Friday that ee-moo was a correct and acceptable pronunciation of the name Australia’s national bird.
This decision came as Stu Rushfield, a reporter and the technical director of the NPR weekend edition published his first story for the program about an escaped Maryland emu named Winston Featherbill.
The issue of pronunciation was brought to NRP’s Research, Archives & Data team who ruled (incorrectly) that ee-moo was acceptable to put to air.
Rushfield said the team based their decision on previous on-air pronunciations, as well as how the bird’s (American) owner said the species’ name. But, one can only assume, failed to ask any one of the 24.9 million Australians who are an authority on the matter in the process.
This ruling has been met with outrage, with comments labelling the decision “absurd” and a “travesty”. Rushfield himself tweeted that he “may have created an international incident”.
Many Twitter commentators incorrectly assumed the word “emu” stemmed from Indigenous Australian languages, but NickEnfield, a professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney, said this is likely not the case.
“We aren’t 100% sure but it’s assumed it has come originally from Portuguese and not from any Indigenous Australian languages that we know of,” he said.
The Portuguese word “ema” was originally used to refer to a cassowary, and may be based on an Arabic word meaning “big bird”. The word was likely brought to Australasia by early colonial explorers.
“This is pretty typical of English which is just absolutely chock-full of words that are borrowed from languages from all over the world,” Enfield said.
“We mangle it to a more comfortable pronunciation for our own language and, you know, then just takes
off.”
So it seems both the Aussies and Yanks are guilty of brutalising the bird’s name to suit their lazy anglo accents.
But, Kate Burridge, a professor of linguists at Monash University in Victoria, said the progression from ee-mew to ee-moo is part of a larger trend, where a ‘yu’ sound known as “[J]” is used instead of “u”.
An example of the loss of “[J]” is in the word “nude”. Pronounced in decades past as “new-d” or “n-yu-ed”, most Australians and Americans now say “nood”.
“American English speakers drop the sound much more than English speakers from England or Australia speakers … It’s a sound that has been somewhat lost to history,” Burridge said.
“Even the name ‘Susan’ was pronounced ‘S-yew-san’, and suit was ‘syew-t’.”
While the “[J]” sounds after an “M” have generally survived longer, such as in “mute”, Burridge said the American pronunciation of “emu” was just another step in a gradual linguist trend.
Enfield also pointed out the inherently democratic nature of language.
“The way people use the language is then what becomes the norm, there is no authority on this … This is one of the things that linguists teach our first-year students. The public essentially uses language in a way that becomes a giant authority,” he said.
But if the comment section of Rushfield’s Twitter announcement can be considered in anyway representative, Australians appear to universally believe that ee-mew is correct.
Then again given this a native Australian bird, some have suggested we should consider ditching the anglicised-Portuguese name altogether and look to traditional Australian languages.
According to reporting from NITV, the Warlpiri mob call emus “yankirri”, and the people of both the Gamilaraay and Wiradjuri nations referred to the bird as “thinawan” or “dinawan”.