Pronunciation II: Home Sweet Wilkes-Barre Or Nogales
Submitted by Sarah D. Bunting on February 29, 2008 – 10:40 AM253 Comments
My apologies to central and western PA, but for years, I thought they were two different towns: Wilkes-Barre, pronounced “Wilks Bar,” and “Wilkesbury,” like the Traveling Wilburys.
And if someone could please remind me how “Nogales” is pronounced, I’d appreciate it.
My PA family members always said “LANK-uh-ster.” Newark, NJ is “Noork”; Newark, DE is “New Ark.”
Anyone here from the Vincennes, IN area? How do you pronounce “Vincennes”?
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I grew up in eastern PA and we always pronounced it “wilkes-bare.” Anything else just made us laugh.
Another Baltimore gem: the area of the city where you can eat pasta and play bocce ball till your heart’s content: Little IT-lee (as opposed to It-ah-lee)
I grew up in Wilkes-Barre, in the 60s through 90s. The “Heights” section. We pronounced it “berry” though I had a friend from a different section of town who called it kinda like “bare-uh”, and I had heard the “bare” and “bar” variants. But “berry” is the correct way, which is supposed to sound exactly like “bury” as in you dig a whole and “bury” something. If I’m remembering correctly, the people from Pittston had the hardest time pronouncing that word.
Those newscasters and other fancy people pronouncing it “Bar” probably came from somewhere else, like New York, and as a kind of punishment got demoted to working in Wilkes-Barre.
And “Scranton” was always pronounced kinda like “scrant-in” that you don’t really enunciate either syllable, but the emphasis is on the “scrant” and you barely spit out the “in”. It always makes me smile to hear old(er) people from around there pronounce that town.