Credit: City of Bellefontaine
Ohio Proud brought together a group of Californians to entertain us Ohioans with attempts to pronounce Ohio’s cities’ names. To be fair, many of our state’s towns are named after Native American tribes and their various languages — Chillicothe is Shawnee, and Tuscarawas derives from the Delaware languages — but some pronunciations are just downright silly… Versailles? Russia?

Raise your hand if you learned a few new proper pronunciations for yourself; I’ve been driving through Gnadenhutten for years and never knew about that ‘ji’ sound at all. Frankly it’s much more amusing to say GUH – NAD – DEN – HUT -TEN, in my opinion. Alert the township, their name has changed.

I guess we’ve taken it for granted, being Ohioans, growing up with these funky words incorporated into our vocabulary.

Check out the video below:


What’re some of your favorite Ohio town names?

This article appears in Aug 10-16, 2016.

2 replies on “Watch Californians Try to Pronounce Ohio City Names”

  1. Yep. It’s hard, ‘specially when they hear “Nerk, Ahia”

    I live in north Los Angeles county now, so when I return to CBus, I mess with my friends and ask them to pronounce “Sepulveda.” and “Cuahuenga”

    Yes, I am mean to them.

  2. I’ve never heard Elyria pronounced the way they showed it on the video. Everyone I know uses 4 syllables.

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