I enjoy watching recent Seattle arrivals attempt to pronounce Mukilteo, Sequim, and Sekiu.

I grew up in Long Island, New York, and there used to be a radio commercial for a local insurance company that bagged on national competitors for not being able to pronounce Ronkonkoma. Other local place names that were difficult for some to pronounce, mostly indigenous language derived, were Quogue, Patchogue, Cutchogue, Yaphank, Massapequa, Secatogue. If you can rattle those off in 1 or 2 seconds, and still throw in a four letter epithet, you can pass as a local. F'n Quogue.

Louisiana has a long list of place names like this. New Orleans street names alone have standard pronunciations, many of which are not obvious especially if you've seen the name in other contexts. Then there are the city names like Plaquemines, Natchitoches, and even New Orleans itself (if you say "new or-LEENZ" like Chuck Berry you will be immediately flagged as an outsider).

I reminded my wife of Natchitoches every time she complained about pronouncing Massachusetts place names like Leominster when we lived up north.

I grew up in New Orleans and now live in Seattle, and all of my intuition for pronunciation is just totally broken.

In many places, if you see a "weird" (as in non-English-seeming) place name, a reasonable pronunciation guess is to just assume it's from a Romance language and pronounce it vaguely Spanish/French-ish. This works because so many foreign names that are common in the US that aren't obviously Anglo/Germanic are from Spanish, French, or Italian immigrants.

New Orleans screws that all up, though, because it has such a complex intertwined cultural history. In New Orleans, place names often have a pronunciation that is explicitly weirder and sort of the opposite of phonetic. You mentioned "Natchitoches", which is pronounced locally like "Nackodish". There is no reasonable algorithm that would take as input the spelling of a place name in New Orleans and output its pronunciation.

So my usual algorithm for pronouncing an unfamiliar name is, "Guess that it's like a Romance language and if not assume it's completely weird and unrelated to the spelling."

But Native American-derived names in the Pacific Northwest often confound that. They don't have Romance vowels or emphasis at all (for obvious reasons). And the pronunciation often is very close to the spelling. (I assume that's because the spelling came along so much more recently here in the PNW than on the East and Gulf Coast, and hasn't had as much time to drift.)

My dumb algorithm for pronouncing PNW placenames is "Imagine an American who's never even heard of a European country much less visited one, and have them pronounce the name phonetically." And it works surprisingly well!

For example, "Mukilteo". If you try to throw some Romance flair onto it, you'd get "Muh-KILL-tey-o", which isn't right (but does sound charmingly exotic). It's anybody's guess how that would be pronounced if it were a street in New Orleans. Maybe "Mill-toe".

But if you imagine some hopelessly bored midwestern kid forced to read it out loud in school and not even trying to get it right and they'd go, "Muh-kill-TEE-oh" and... that's it.

Likewise, I kept wanting "Anacortez" to sound like some Spanish explorer "Anna CorTEZ". But, no, it's just "Anna-CORE-tiss". "Humptulips" is literally "hump tulips". "Chimacum" is "chim-uh-cum". "Snoqualmie" is "snow-quall-me". They all have the most vanilla-sounding pronunciation.

I admit that Sequim ("skwim") and Puyallup ("pyoo-A-lup") are weird.

> In many places, if you see a "weird" (as in non-English-seeming) place name, a reasonable pronunciation guess is to just assume it's from a Romance language

In New England at least you have three options: English, French (Canadian), or indigenous as mangled by a bunch of half-literate English or French speakers 200 years ago. As a result, it's never quite clear if you're dealing with vowels that went through the Great Vowel Shift that divides middle and modern English[0] or not.

[0] I am not a linguist, cunning or otherwise. This is an approximation.

Oh, I forgot Puyallup, good one. Without the state fair radio commercials I’d be lost. I DID pronounce it as “Muh-KILL-tey-o” on the first day that we moved there 20 years ago, but never again. And Sekiu being pronounced “C Q” seems like it may violate your pronunciation schema. :)

Worcester, which will have the advantage of letting us find any secret British.

The town in Ohio is literally spelled Wooster. I'm not sure what that says about us, but it certainly says something.

That's named for a Revolutionary War general, whose name was Wooster, like 1920s British character Bertie Wooster. There were 169 Wooster families in London in the 1891 UK census. I kind of doubt they all descended from the US, so what this says to me is that some British person filling out a form heard the name "Worcester" and very sensibly wrote Wooster.

Worcester is a corruption of Wigraceaster which is a corruption of Weorgoran Ceaster, so rigidly sticking to an orthodox spelling is ridiculous and it should be reformed. Like Featherstonehaugh turned into Fanshaw.

The pronunciation of Chili, NY is an immediate way to ID anyone from the Rochester area.

...of course it's pronounced "Chye-lie".

I can't talk, though, I come from Ohio where we have a city named "Versailles" that's pronounced "vur-SAYLES".

Illinois also has a Ver-Say-Lees as well as a Kay-row (Cairo)

Americans love French. It's their nitch. It probably comes from reading so much Nitchski.

> ...that's pronounced "vur-SAYLES"

Indiana has one too. I found this out when my wife kept using that pronunciation while touring the namesake French palace on our honeymoon.

Don’t forget Charlotte, NY (pronounced Shar-LOT).

Or Calais, VT is pronounced CAL-iss.