I Say Chor-Its-O, You Say Chor-Eeth-O

It’s easy at Nando’s; everything on the menu is written in plain English and the most exotic word you’re going to have to use when ordering is ‘peri-peri’, which is thankfully said as it’s spelt. But when we’re trying to be a bit fancier and eat somewhere else for a change, the menus can leave us stumped. How on earth are we meant to pronounce ‘bouillabaisse’? And what about ‘viennoiserie’? What even is that?!

We’re reassured to learn that we’re not the only ones though, as a recent survey of 2,000 adults carried out by Brioche Pasquier – don’t even get us started on trying to pronounce that – found lots of Brits struggle to pronounce some of their favourite foods.

As a result, one in five have been served something totally different to what they actually wanted in a restaurant – you’re unlikely to get this problem when you simply ask for ‘chips’, right?

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Yet, try to broaden our horizons we do, which has seen one in six of us awkwardly corrected by restaurant staff for our poor pronunciation efforts in the past. While we’re at it, should that be ‘pro-nown-see-a-shun’? Or ‘pro-nun-see-a-shun’? See what we’re having to deal with? And that’s just English…

One-third of diners even admitted to abandoning an order because they simply couldn’t pronounce the words on the menu, with Brioche Pasquier compiling a list of the top 40 words that leave Brits tongue-tied.

These include favourites such as chorizo (remember that should be a ‘th’ sound, not a ‘z’), quinoa (‘keen-wah’, not ‘quinn-oh-a’), and quesadilla (kay-sah-di-yah).

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From the silent ‘g’ in gnocchi to the silent ‘j’ in fajita and what feels like endless ‘t’s and ‘z’s in tzatziki, there are dozens of food-related words that we find a pain (au chocolat – there’s another one!) to say out loud without feeling stupid.

And it’s not just our food that we struggle to pronounce, but our drinks too, with caipirinha and daiquiri both featuring on the list too. It might sound a bit crass and make us giggle childishly every time we ask for a Sex on the Beach, but at least we can say it.

A spokesperson for Brioche Pasquier commented: “Our results found people are twice as likely to have a go at pronouncing an unfamiliar food word as admit they don’t know how to pronounce it.

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“This can lead to further embarrassment as people get more exciting and unusual words wrong, so it’s probably best to just try and laugh it off.”

So, does all this mean we’re an ignorant bunch? Not if we’re trying, it doesn’t. And we can’t help but think that our school ‘modern foreign language’ lessons would have been a lot more useful if they’d focused more on Mexican words like quesadilla, jalapeno, fajita and guacamole than on teaching us how to describe our pets in German.

We’ll just have to keep risking mild embarrassment every time we eat out, keep going to the likes of Nando’s, Greggs and Wetherspoons, or stick to cooking for ourselves at home, where it doesn’t matter how you pronounce the food you’re eating, and you can call it ‘quinn-oh-a’ all you like.