Do you shop at Leedle?

A friend recently asked how I pronounce the name of the German store Lidl. My initial response was, “Liddle, of course”. But then I remembered that in Germany they say “Leedle” – so that’s what I use when I’m over there.

This threw up the question of whether we English speakers should pronounce foreign words exactly as they’re spoken in their native language. For me, the answer’s no – not necessarily.

After all, surely the main purpose of pronunciation is to make both speaking and comprehension as easy as possible, whichever language we're talking in?

Just take the automotive brand Volkswagen. On the off chance a non-German speaker manages to pronounce this the German way – so pholks-va-gen (apologies to linguistics buffs for my poor phonetic spelling) – would you understand them immediately? Possibly not.

Fact is, people are generally quite lazy and don’t want to have to go out of their way to pronounce or understand a word. And this isn't just an English thing. In the UK we pronounce IKEA, Sweden’s greatest export, as i-keeya. In Germany it’s ee-keeya. But my friend Kira, a native Swedish speaker, tells me this:

“We would say ee-ke-a, no ‘y’ sound, with the ‘k’ sounding like the french ‘que’ and the ‘a’ like the german ‘a’.”

So neither English nor German speakers pronounce it the 'right' way. But I don’t think it really matters. The main thing is that we make ourselves easily understood (it's about good old audience centricity again). And if altering the way we pronounce a word helps us to do that, all the better.

But let’s please not start changing the way we write things because of the way we pronounce them – “I should of paid more attention in school” just isn’t right or cool.