Bard of Breaking News (Breaking Bard)

There are different ways to pronounce ‘haute couture’ and I just saw a news bulletin with a story that, in my opinion, demonstrated the best practice when pronouncing foreign expressions like haute couture.

If you search how to pronounce haute couture – you’ll find some sites suggest:
1. haute is pronounced like out
2. haute is pronounced like oat
3. it’s best to pronounce is ‘between’ out and oat, start with out and switch to oat and to say it fast

When I checked how to say the word in French – I heard haute pronounced like ORT.

So there’s OUT, OAT and ORT…and somewhere between OUT and OAT

Which one should you use?

I usually recommend using for Australian news audiences the British English pronunciation even if it is different from the foreign language the word is taken from.

The news buletin pronounced haute like OUT – but the main point is the reader and reporter pronounced it the same way.

Usually, reporter’s voice on the news package has already been recorded and it’s easier for the reader to listen to the package pronunciation and to match that pronunciation in the intro. Of course, the reader shouldn’t adopt a wrong pronunciation just for the sake of matching – but if there are various ways of pronouncing a word or expression, try to be consistent.

To be honest, general commercial news will not feature haute couture stories that often unless local designers are involved.

I have seen so many examples where the reader pronounces a foreign exzpression one way and the reporter pronounces it differently.

Often there are geographical and generation differences in pronouncing foreign words such as fracas and jaguar and Nicaragua.

When I help newsrooms I encourage staff to:
1. be aware of variations in the pronunciation of different words – especially UK and US English variations
2. generally prefer the pronunciation more mature viewers would use (British English) – because people who still get their news from TV are usually older, and
2. ensure consistency between the reader and reporter