I’ve heard many of the locals call it Por-Tell-en - putting the emphasis on the T and running the words together.
But then when I asked a tour guide about it, they said I should pronounce it the way I was, Bow-more.Īnother example would be the place where many Islay distilleries go to get their malted barley Port Ellen. But I’ve heard more than a few islanders saying Bo-More, putting the emphasis on the M instead of the B.
To an American, it is pronounced Bow-more. Take the home of the world’s oldest aging warehouse, located on the Eastern shore of Islay’s Loch Indaal. And for someone used to American English pronunciations, it seemed like an added challenge would be the variety of localized Scottish dialects that add another challenging layer to getting the names right.īut after my trip to Scotland, I realized that not only was I having trouble with these words, even native Scots weren’t completely clear on some of the distillery’s pronunciation. Well, the difficulty starts with a set of phonetic rules that are very unfamiliar to English speakers. For an American, uninitiated in the world of Scots Gaelic, butchering the pronunciation of names like Bruichladdich, Auchentoshan, or Ledaig felt like a rite of passage into the whisky drinker’s hall of shame. Welcome to my world, circa 2018, a year before my first trip to Ireland and Scotland. Have you ever had an occasion not to order or talk about a particular whisky, simply because you were a little concerned about your ability to pronounce it?
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