Museum Spam

If the title rhymes for you, congratulations!

For as long as I can remember, people — okay, mostly a few of my linguistics major friends — have been in disbelief at my pronunciation of the word “museum”. I pronounce it in the obviously correct way, where the first syllable sounds like “mew” and the second, emphasized, syllable is “zam”, rhymes with “yam”.¹ Yet my friends, Merriam-Webster, and other trusted authorities typically insist on following “mew” with “zee”, like the letter, and “um”, so that it rhymes with “colosseum”.²

Wiktionary, the voice of the linguistically informed people, permits my pronunciation, but only with a note of “dialectal” and a note that it’s really said more like “zeh-um” in the end. This might be true for some people, but I like to think that I have decent awareness of my own language patterns, and I’m definitely saying “am” rather than “eh-um”. I can kind of say it this way if I imagine adopting a strong Southern accent, where the “a” in “am” tends to be combined with another vowel making a sound closer to “uh”, but even then I don’t think my vowels are in agreement with Wiktionary’s.³

It would be easy to dismiss this as a weird quirk of how I speak — there are plenty — were it not for Wiktionary’s imprimatur, and some other evidence that my friends and I have gathered to prove that I am not alone in holding to the true pronunciation.⁴ For one, somebody named Zach Burchill has the same weird pronunciation and the same desire to learn where it comes from and why everybody else hates it so much. He gathered some sort-of-kind-of serious data on who says it and where they come from geographically, but unfortunately he has neither released it or responded to a comment I left asking him about it, so I’m going to just have to engage in basically unfounded speculation for now.

To start, I presumably learned this pronunciation from somewhere, rather than innovating it myself. The issue is that I grew up in North Carolina to parents from Northern California (sort of) and Ohio (sort of), so, as my NYT dialect quiz results amply demonstrate, this could be a feature from a good half of the country. Except that neither of my parents say it that way, they deny that any other relatives share my pronunciation, and none of my friends say it like me either.

There’s other evidence also. Zach Burchill is from Indiana, and claims to have found it on people in Western Pennsylvania and Texas. One of my friends claims to have heard this pronunciation on people in northwestern Ohio. Another claims to have heard it on somebody from Haiti. Wiktionary provides an example of a Rhode Islander saying something more like “zeh-um” as well as an anecdote of a Bostonian with a similar pronunciation.⁵

And then there’s a Reddit thread with 376 comments devoted to hashing this issue out, plus another, smaller, thread. After you get through a whole bunch of comments expressing their disbelief about the “zam” pronunciation, the next-highest-rated comment is somebody from Indiana voting for “zam”. The original poster, who comes from New Jersey but with influences from Pennsylvania and Kentucky, also says it that way. Other comments mark it as being found in Illinois, both New York City and New York state, New Jersey, Kentucky, multiple different parts of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Florida, and Connecticut, although they’re still drowned out by people insisting on the clearly incorrect pronunciation.

Interestingly, a handful of commenters on the thread write the last syllable as “zim”, presumably as if it rhymes with “Tim”. I’m not sure what to make of this, but am inclined to chalk it up to people often being pretty bad at writing out sounds. That also seems to quite possibly be the issue with a few odder pronunciations, including one transcribed as “zyam” and one that places stress on the first syllable.

This suggests something like a basis of support for “zam” in Indiana and parts of Ohio near the Indiana border, with a possible second pocket in the Northeast.⁶ Alternatively, its native range could stretch from Indiana to the southern part of New England, with its frequency fading out the further east it goes. The rest of the country seems to insist on contorting their mouths to say “zee-um”.

Burchill suggests that it might have to do with Midwestern patterns of changing the “a” vowel in “yam”, what linguists call the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. To be more precise, some people in the Midwest pronounce what the rest of the country thinks of as an “a” vowel like “ay-uh” or “eh-uh”, similar to the “ee-uh” in museum.⁷ So people living there may have replaced the rare “ee-uh” combination with a more similar “a” vowel, or heard other people’s “ee-uh” as an extremely changed “a” sound even if they do not themselves have the shift.⁸ This seems reasonable to me; I’d note that that vowel often undergoes a similar shift in many Southern accents.

The interesting thing is that the region where “museum” is reported doesn’t exactly map up with the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. Bill Labov’s work includes a map that shows no Indiana cities in the affected area. I don’t think any of my family members have the shift either. So maybe this pronunciation isn’t exactly overlapping with the shift, since there are so many reports from Indiana and Ohio but so few from Michigan and Wisconsin. I’m not particularly familiar with Indiana dialects, but a cursory search isn’t revealing any other pronunciation changes that could lead to this result.

In a very predictable finding, the results also don’t match up with where famous museums are located. Similarly, I can’t think of any mechanism where a pronunciation based on spelling would be so regionally limited, and, of all the ways the “eu” digraph is pronounced in English, “a” as in “ram” has to be one of the rarest ones. The Northern Cities Vowel Shift might not quite match the data, but it does better than the alternative explanations.

So until somebody collects some actual, rigorous, data on how people pronounce “museum”, I’m afraid I can’t give a definitive answer as to why I pronounce it with “zam.” There’s some evidence that it’s from a region centered around Indiana, but I can’t find any relatives — in Ohio or elsewhere — who say it that way. It might come from a feature of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, but that’s also quite a tentative suggestion. Still, none of this can get in the way of my conviction that my pronunciation is correct and everybody else is in error.

Thanks to various of my friends for their help in looking for this pronunciation and brainstorming possible causes.

1. /mju'zæm/ or something like that for those of you who know the International Phonetic Alphabet.

2. /mju'ziəm/ or /mju'zi.əm/ maybe.

3. This is a horrendous oversimplification of raising and diphthongization, but unfortunately I think my blog readership is almost entirely people with minimal linguistics background. My apologies to readers who would prefer more linguistics.

4. You heard it here first: It’s ethical to have prescriptivist attitudes about language as long as you’re prescribing something so unpopular nobody would actually follow it anyways.

5. I’m not particularly good at transcribing sounds, but what she’s saying there sounds a bit more like “zay-um” to me.

6. Given the Wiktionary anecdotes, this pocket might actually be saying “zay-um” or “zeh-um” or something more like that rather than “zam.”

7. I.e. raising the vowel to a diphthong.

8. I assume some people invented it independently and others picked it up from other people who said it that way.