How Do You Say Caramel In New York?

I think it’s Americans that say Carmel. Pretty sure everyone here in the UK say Caramel as it’s spelt. I only ever heard someone say Carmel like 5 years ago on Xbox by a friend from the US. When she first said it, I had no idea what she was talking about. So weird

“Caramel”, which (clearly) has an “a” in the middle, has only this spelling world wide. But in my experience, North Americans (Canadians too) don’t pronounce the middle “a”.

Joshua Katz, a doctoral student in linguistics at N.C. State University, found that those who say caramel with two syllables (car-muhl) predominantly make up most of the United States, encompassing western, southwestern, and midwestern states.

How is caramel pronounced?

The Oxford Dictionaries states: “The word caramel can acceptably be pronounced in several accepted ways, including KARR-uh-mel, KARR-uh-muhl, and, in North American English, KAR-muhl. The disappearance of that second syllable -uh- in the final pronunciation seems to have been in the works for a long time.”.

Well, for starters the English version of the word, like so many other English words, has a path that goes from Latin (“cannamellis,” where canna means “cane” and mel/mellis means “honey”) to 18th century Spanish or Portuguese (“caramelo”) to French, which is where we see “caramel” used for the first time. English uses the French word, …

How is caramel pronounced?

You see, the word caramel is derived from the 18th-century Spanish turned French word caramelo, which is pronounced as car-a-mello. So, North American English speakers adopted the “car” pronunciation from the original word, whereas British speakers tend to pronounce caramel as “care-a-muhl.”. There’s yet another common way of saying caramel.

Caramel with three syllables (care-a-muhl and care-a-melle), on the other hand, is more commonplace for those living along the east coast, as well as in southeastern states spanning all the way from Louisiana to Florida.