How Do You Pronounce 'Pho'?

"Pho" has been defined as "a type of Vietnamese soup, usually made from a beef bone stock and spices with noodles and thinly sliced beef or chicken added." However, the word has not always been pronounced correctly, and it was once estimated to be one of the top ten most mispronounced dishes in the U.S., along with the Greek delicacy of Gyros and the Italian meal of gnocchi.

In addition to pronunciation confusion when spoken in English, it has also been highlighted that the word pho alone is not used to refer to the soup in Vietnamese, and that pho strictly refers to the noodles themselves but not to other aspects of the dish; another word is usually added in order to be more specific about the kind of pho it happens to be. So what is the correct way to say the name of this popular dish?

How Do You Say "Pho"?

Pho is sometimes incorrectly pronounced as "fo" (in a way that happens to rhyme with the word "foe"), but the correct pronunciation is closer to "fuh" or "phu" with a short 'u' sound instead of a long one. Mispronunciations in English partly stem from the fact that Vietnamese is a tonal language, while English is not. The Cambridge Dictionary defines a tone language as "a language in which the same series of sounds can represent different meanings, depending on how high or low they are spoken."

In Vietnamese, there are a range of tones used to pronounce vowels, and the tone used can transform the meaning of the word entirely. One example that has been cited for this concerns the word which is rendered in English as "ma," but which can mean six different things in Vietnamese, depending on the diacritics used for the way it is written (ma, má, mà, mả, mã, and mạ).

And so, in addition to being pronounced differently in English, the word "pho" is also written differently in English compared to how it is written in Vietnamese. In its original language, the word is scripted as "phở," whereas the English transcription (which first began appearing in print around 1935) dispenses with the diacritical marks altogether.

Lost in Translation

However, it is the diacritical mark above the 'o' that is crucial to indicate the pronunciation of the word for Vietnamese speakers. This particular mark is known in Vietnamese as "dấu hỏi," which translates as the "hook above" in English.

The absence of this specific mark in the written English language shows how the precise pronunciation of pho can be lost in translation. These kinds of nuances indicate how the issue of pronouncing in one language a word that originated in another language can be much more complex than it first seems.

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