ní gráinne sbagliato

I dream that one day I will write a very trashy romantic comedy of errors where an Irish woman and an English barista fall in love over the shop counter and misunderstandings ensue because the Irish woman has been using a fake name on her coffee order for the sake of convenience. At the climax of the story, she will seize a pen and scrawl her real name on a takeaway cup and hand it to the barista, and the barista will say something dopey like, ‘Nice to meet you, Siobhán,’ without hesitation or mispronunciation, and then they kiss and the credits roll with a Carly Rae Jepsen cover of ‘Star of the County Down’.

Although I’ve written about this before, I am making a return to my Irish names soapbox after a piece in the Times last week, entitled ‘Revealed: the hardest words to pronounce’. A recent study indicates that over the last year, the word pronunciations most googled by Britons were Aoife (with 111,000 searches) and Saoirse, with Niamh and Siobhán also appearing in the top ten. Journalist Andrew Ellson wrote of the top spot name: ‘For those unsure, it is pronounced “ee-fa”, unhelpfully almost nothing like its spelling.’ In the same Times edition, Ann Treneman observed (in her article ‘Oops, I’ve tripped over another verbal trap’): ‘The “news” that Aoife and Saoirse are unpronounceable for most people was met with silence in my house. You think? For decades I have simply avoided saying all those crazy Irish names. If cornered I will attempt what I think of as a linguistic flying-fish manoeuvre, gliding above it all with an airy “shhh” sound to indicate the likes of Saoirse.’

A few years ago I probably would have been in saddle-my-wolf-let’s-ride-into-battle mode at remarks like this. Now, I’ve seen them so many times I am mainly offended by how boring they are. The actress Saoirse Ronan is an endlessly good sport when she does interviews and all anyone can talk about is how batshit they think Irish spellings seem. Get some new jokes! In this day and age, anyone who appears not to know that Irish is its own language with spellings that are different from English is either a deeply lazy journalist, or affecting wilful ignorance in the interest of a cheap shot.

I can be quite unforgiving towards the Brits as a collective, but I can’t help thinking that the results of the actual study surely suggest something quite positive; that people are actually bothering to research how to pronounce a name they’re unsure of. If more people had done this with my name over the years it would have significantly reduced the number of situations in which I have had to awkwardly correct them. A couple of years ago someone new at work referred to me as ‘Gree-anne’ for about four months, which was then made even more uncomfortable when someone in a meeting misheard ‘Gree-anne’ as ‘Rhiannon’ and I thought I was going to have to simply change my job or change my name. Someone else at work once asked if the reason I had my pronouns in my email signature was to let people know that Gráinne was a feminine name. During lockdown when everything moved online, someone well-meaning would start off every meeting saying, ‘We’ll just do a round of introductions; I’ll introduce myself and then nominate the next person, and so on until we’ve got round everyone,’ and of course I was the last person nominated every time, because I don’t think anyone wanted to embarrass themselves by attempting my name.

I don’t get a kick out of anyone feeling embarrassed for not knowing how to pronounce my name; I get second-hand embarrassment so it’s just a mutual buzzkill. My name is pronounced grawn-ya (bit like Sláinte but with different consonants), although some people refer to me by close enough alternatives which I will also answer to, including gran-ya (like lasagne) and even occasionally gran-yay (like Kanye). Grá in Irish means love and ghrian means sun (so maybe anyone who’s ever called me ‘Gree-anne’ was simply alluding to my inherently sunny disposition). The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne is an early Irish myth about Gráinne’s betrothal to Fionn mac Cumhaill and subsequent elopement with one of his warriors. (There is a 2015 gangster film adaptation of this story called Pursuit starring Brendan Gleeson and Liam Cunningham but I struggled to get on board with the narrative when I watched it because I am not the sort of Gráinne who would ever run away from the chance to marry Liam Cunningham.) And the sixteenth-century pirate queen Gráinne Ní Mháille is of course an absolutely class historical figure to share a name with. I don’t mind when people ask for clarification around how to say it and I love when people ask what it means.

For me, comments like those featured in the Times last week strip the joy out of Irish names. Even after centuries of British colonialism contributing to linguistic and cultural erasure, there is still so much beauty in the language and history of names like mine, names like Aoife and Saoirse and Niamh and Siobhán. The fact that so many people are looking up how to pronounce them means they’re enduring. Rather than celebrate and embrace this, some people prefer to snark and sneer and suggest that anyone with an Irish name is being deliberately obtuse. (Literally the only time I have ever personally been inclined to do this with someone’s name was watching House of the Dragon last year when one of the characters was called Carl but with a Q. Sort your shit out, Qarl.) England has taken plenty from Ireland over the centuries, but the repeat offence of ‘wHy dOn’T tHe iRIsH sPeLL tHeIR nAmEs pRoPErLy?’ might be the most boring take of all.

Cover photo by Adam Jaime on Unsplash