Ercel Placide, a NOLA.com reader from New Iberia, said he’s aware that not everyone pronounces New Orleans precisely the same way.
“I’ve heard a plethora of different pronunciations,” he said, listing New Orluhns, New Orleens, and Nawlins.
The question is, he said, “What is correct?”
Arriving at a correct pronunciation for anything in New Orleans will probably remain an unrequited quest. With its various language influences and amalgam of cultures, New Orleans is the Tower of Babel, without the tower.
“Oh God,” said Loyola University history professor Justin Nystrom, “the answer is, there’s no one answer.”
Nystrom, who is from northern Illinois, said he employs the smoothed pronunciation New Orluhns.
In his opinion, adding a “really long E hurts your spine.”
Painful or not, “you hear it a lot in music,” he said. “But you don’t hear it much in conversation.”
Cue Louis Armstrong
New Orleans-born historic interpreter and Black Indian masker Dianne Honore said she also uses the sandpapered pronunciation New Orluhns. In day-to-day life, she said, she never hears the long-E pronunciation, New Orleens.
As Honore pointed out, the funny thing is, most people inconsistently use the long-E sound when pronouncing Orleens (Orleans) Avenue.
Eternal hometown hero Louis Armstrong didn’t pen the song “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans,” but his emphatically hard-E pronunciation of the city in that tune was certainly heard and repeated around the world.
Of course, Armstrong was abiding by the rhyme scheme invented by a Long Island lyricist. He probably didn’t ordinarily unleash the hard-E. Or did he?
At approximately the six-minute mark in a 1963 interview archived on YouTube, Satchmo explains that in 1922 King Oliver invited him to join his Chicago-based band. “Couldn’t anybody else get me out of New Orleens but him,” Armstrong said.
New Orleens! He says it, plain as day.
PHOTO:LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Jazz great Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong
Who knows, maybe more people pronounced it New Orleens in Armstrong’s era – he’s been dead for a half-century after all. Or maybe singing “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleens" 1,000 times tuned his pronunciation.
Or maybe Louis is just the exception that proves the rule. He was an exceptional dude, after all.
A nonpartisan linguist
Tulane University associate professor of linguistics Nathalie Dajko said she employs the smoothed-out New Orluhns pronunciation. But she tries her best to be nonpartisan. “I’m not going to disapprove of any pronunciation, because I’m not from here,” she said.
Dajko, who hails from Vancouver, Canada, pointed out that “language is always changing.” For decades and decades, she said, the R has been “magically disappearing” from Crescent City speech. Considering our collective R-absent pronunciation of the term Mardi Gras, it’s predictable that some people would pronounce the city in an R-free manner, like New Awluhns, or something like that.
Dajko said there is also a stretched pronunciation heard in some quarters that sounds like New Or-lee-uhns. She called that the “prestige” pronunciation.
One of oldies radio station WTIX’s buoyant jingles from years back famously exploited the prestige pronunciation. Readers of a certain age may want to sing along: “W T I X New Or Lee Uhns!”
If there’s one thing that all the authorities mentioned above agree on completely, it's that the exaggerated pronunciation Nawlins, spelled N’Awlins, is an abomination.
“I tend to associate it with things aimed at tourists,” Nystrom said. “I think it’s said to satisfy people’s expectations.”
Dajko said that Nawlins provokes “a notion of outsiders trying to pronounce it and overshooting the mark.”
New Orleans-born historic interpreter and Black Indian masker Dianne Honore, with her all-white suit for Mardi Gras 2021
Honore considers it “comic relief.”
“Nobody in my entire life said that,” she said, “I don’t know where we got it.”
Naturally Nawlins?
Even Mr. Placide, who posed the pronunciation question in the first place, said he always thought Nawlins was used by outsiders to make fun of the city.
The popular late WWL-TV personality Frank Davis was clearly enchanted by New Orleans’ peculiar pronunciations. It was part of his affable everyman persona. Davis’ catchphrase “Naturally N’Awlins” probably popularized the pronunciation Nawluns, as much as anything.
But, in a relaxed television segment about the schoolyard game called cabbage ball, Davis declared: “I betcha if you went to school in New Orluhns, grammar school or high school, you played cabbage ball."
Yep, New Orluhns not Nawluns. The pronunciation of the city at the big bend in the river not only seems to change from person to person, but sometimes with the situation.
Professor Dajko said that a surprising recent development is the conversational use of the abbreviation NOLA to refer to the city. Not long ago, she said, she heard a man on the street say, “Welcome to Nola.”
It was a first. The distillation of New Orleans, Louisiana, is common in writing, but she’d never heard it spoken.
On the other hand, she said, “a friend of mine who teaches high school says some of his students say ‘Nola.’ So there you have it. Run-of-the-mill change. I don't know who started it, but the kids are apparently buying it.”
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