The Most Mispronounced Brand from Every Country

Kodak. Ikea. Sony. Sometimes, a brand name just sounds like what it represents — even if the name doesn’t actually mean anything at all.

Take Toca Boca, for instance. “We wanted a name that was fun to say, easy to say, and that would work in many different countries,” Toca Boca boss Bjorn Jeffery once told an eight-year-old interviewer for Business Insider.

In this case, it worked. Toca Boca’s kids’ apps and games have been downloaded over 849 million times across 215 countries. The phrase is Spanish, but the appeal is universal — even though most of Toca Boca’s young customers don’t understand the words. Perhaps it was inevitable that the firm would one day profit from a crossover deal with the makers of SpongeBob SquarePants, another brand that’s got major mileage from the pure say-ability of its name.

So yes, the sonic qualities of a brand name can be just as effective as its meaning, as long as consumers know how to say it, or are curious enough to find out. To identify the brands from every country that are mispronounced the most, we compiled and analysed data from the pronunciation website Forvo.com.

About This Study

Data analysts at BusinessFinancing.co.uk compiled a list of 16,875 leading brands worldwide and searched for each on Forvo.com, the world’s biggest pronunciation dictionary. We then recorded the number of listens for each word and ranked the brands with the most listens overall and by category for each nationality.

Key Findings

• France’s Société Générale is the most mispronounced brand in the world, with 2,100,000 listens on Forvo.com.
• With 593,000 listens, Tommy Hilfiger is America’s most mispronounced brand and the fourth most mispronounced in the world.
• The UK’s most mispronounced brand is Burberry, with 141,000 Internet users listening to its correct pronunciation to find out how to pronounce it.
• Arc’teryx is Canada’s most mispronounced brand (44,000 listens,) and Vegemite is Australia’s most mispronounced brand (11,000 listens).
• Swedish music platform Spotify is the world’s most mispronounced tech brand, with 374,000 listens.

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Revealing the Most Mispronounced Brands Around the World

A pair of French companies have the two most mispronounced brand names in the world: financiers Société Générale and car company Peugeot. Indeed, six of the 20 most mispronounced brands are French, while just three are American — despite the general dominance of U.S. brands on the global scene. Germany has five of the top unpronounceable bands, while Swedish brands Ikea, Spotify and Volvo also make the top 20.

A group of entrepreneurs founded Société Générale in 1864 “to promote the development of trade and industry in France.” But since going international with presences in 66 countries, customers have struggled to get to grips with those acute accents on the e’s.

With 2,100,000 listens each month on pronunciation site Forvo.com, Société Générale is mispronounced 2.6 times as often as any non-French brand. Indeed, it’s easier to translate than to say: the é sounds like “ay,” so if you say “society general” with “ay” sounds in the appropriate places, you’re on the right course.

Mapping the Most Mispronounced Brand from Every Country

We found 15 countries with at least one brand that has over 100,000 pronunciation searches on Forvo.com. Two of these are anglophone countries. The hardest-to-pronounce U.S. and UK brands are designer fashion labels named for their founders. America’s is Tommy Hilfiger (see the Most Mispronounced Fashion & Beauty Brands, below), while the UK’s is Burberry.

While British Grazia claims Burberry “may slip easily off the tongue,” some 141,000 web users disagree — although they may be just trying to learn how to say it with the perfect British accent. Of course, there’s no such thing as the perfect British accent, but since Thomas Burberry was from Dorking, a Surrey accent with long vowels and clearly demarked syllables might be most appropriate.

Outside of Europe and the U.S., the most mispronounced brand name is that of Japanese tech firm Hitachi, with 303,000 listens on Forvo.com. Samsung (South Korea) and Huawei (China) are not far behind.

The Hitachi name is made from two kanji characters: hi means “sun,” and tachi means “rise.” The name should sound like “hit Archie” — but it’s important to note that the emphasis is on the first syllable (as demonstrated by CEO Hiroaki Nakanishi) rather than the second.

These Are the Most Mispronounced Tech Brands From Across the Globe

Hitachi is one of four Asian firms among the ten most mispronounced tech brands in the world. But the top spot is taken by Sweden’s Spotify (374,000 listens on Forvo.com).

Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon founded the company in 2006. Ek initially claimed the name was a compound of “spot” and “identify.” While this story indicates how the name should be said, the tale itself turned out to be untrue. In fact, Ek misheard a name that Lorentzon suggested, but they decided to go with what he heard: “Spotify.”

The scale of cost and innovation within tech means that the biggest companies rely on international markets to thrive. But names that might seem intuitive in their original language can baffle foreigners.

Case in point: U.S. firm Hewlett-Packard wisely goes by HP wherever possible. Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded the company in Palo Alto before Silicon Valley was a thing. The double-barrelled name may have seemed more techie and prestigious then, but HP would prove more useful in the long run — hp.com was only the ninth domain name ever to be registered (just after xerox.com and just before IBM.com!).

These Are the Most Mispronounced Food and Drink Brands Worldwide

Half of the ten most mispronounced food and drink brands are alcoholic drinks, drawing attention to the conditions in which a name may be uttered: if you want to sell your tipple, better give it a name that’s easy to say when drunk!

Germany’s Jägermeister is the number one, with 256,000 listens. The herbal liqueur was invented by wine trader and keen hunter Curt Mast, and the brand name means “master of the hunt.” It’s pronounced yay·guh·my·stuh. In China, a drinks company was recently sued for issuing their own herbal liqueur with overly familiar branding, named 野格哈古雷斯 (“YE GE HA GU LE SI”).

Australia’s beloved Vegemite is the country’s most mispronounced brand, with 11,000 listens. A “thicker, stronger spread” than Marmite, according to The Conversation, the “inclusion of vegetable extracts to improve the flavour would give the spread its name, Vegemite, chosen by [manufacturer] Walker’s daughter from competition entries.”

The middle ‘e’ may throw people off: it is not silent, and the correct pronunciation is “veggie-might.” Bonus points for attempting it in an Australian accent.

Uncovering the Most Mispronounced Car Brands

With its clusters of incompatible vowels, ambiguous ‘g’ and silent ‘t,’ Peugeot is the deserving winner of the world’s most mispronounced car brand. The company is over 200 years old and progressed from tools to bicycles to three-wheeled steam-powered automobiles before Armand Peugeot went alone with his car company — later remerging his firm with the family company. Try saying “Pearl Joe” without the ‘l,’ and you’re on your way.

But German cars dominate the top ten — including, bafflingly, BMW. The most mispronounced German car brand is Porsche, with 794,000 listens.

Engineer Ferdinand Porsche founded the brand in 1931, but today’s company is aware of the confusion regarding the name: “In the German language every letter is pronounced to a certain degree,” they state on the official brand website. “[W]e are here to confirm that there are two syllables, and if you’re pronouncing the ‘e’ on the end like an ‘uh’, then you’re on the right track.”

The 20 Most Mispronounced Global Fashion & Beauty Brands

The world’s most mispronounced fashion brand is America’s most mispronounced brand in general. Tommy Hilfiger’s eponymous, all-American founder takes his name from his German-Swiss ancestors, who Americanised the Hilfiker name upon immigrating to the U.S.

Hilfiger originally suggested that the brand be named Tommy Hill for ease of pronunciation. But early investor Mohan Murjani told him, “People can pronounce Yves Saint Laurent, why can’t they pronounce Tommy Hilfiger?” says Hilfiger.

Unsurprisingly, French and Italian firms dominate among the most mispronounced fashion and beauty brands. Italy’s most mispronounced label is Versace, with 238,000 listens on Forvo.com.

Asked which Italian word Donatella Versace wished English speakers would stop saying incorrectly, the creative director and designer said: “Versace.” It’s not “Versachee” but “Versach-eh,” she told Vogue in 2018.

Say It with Pride

A brand name should be “authentic to the personality of the organization,” says brand naming consultant Sasha Stack. And if that connection is more sonic than meaningful, you could be on to a winner — as long as people know how to pronounce it.

Choose a name that looks good on the bill, rolls off the tongue and conjures an image of your product and service, and those few letters may soon come to stand for so much more than the formality of a company name.

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Methodology

To identify the most mispronounced brand from every country, we first pulled a list of brands from each country’s Wikipedia brand page (e.g., American brands), which gave us a total list of 16,875 brands from around the world.

Next, we searched for all brands on Forvo.com (the world’s biggest pronunciation dictionary) and recorded the number of listens for each word. After that, we isolated the brand with the most listens overall and by category for each country.

Our data was gathered and analysed in March 2024.