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01 January 1996
Pronouncing Distillery Names
By Anthony Troon

If you have a good uvular fricative, there are many malt whiskies you can order...without suffering embarrassment or misunderstanding. Auchentoshan, Glenfiddich, Caperdonich, Craigellachie, Benromach, Balmenach, Bladnoch, Glenlochy, Glentauchers...

When ordering whisky by phone, it helps to have a well developed uvular fricative. Pardon? I thought you'd ask.

We are not talking here about rude bits, merely phonetics. "Uvular" means a sound produced by vibrating that strange conical flap above the back of the tongue: "fricative" means that the breath has been forced through a narrow opening. The uvular fricative gives us the Scottish "ch" sound, as in the famous test-phrase that school kids north of the Border have always used to prove their nationality: "It's a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht, och aye."

If you have a good uvular fricative, there are many malt whiskies you can order from The Vaults, by phone, without suffering embarrassment or misunderstanding. Auchentoshan, Glenfiddich, Caperdonich, Craigellachie, Benromach, Balmenach, Bladnoch, Glenlochy, Glentauchers... At the last count, with more than 100 whiskies bottled by the Society in its first decade, nearly a quarter of them involve getting your tongue around the old uv. fric.

But that's not all. It's clear that we live in times of sophisticated marketing, when legions of highly-paid consultants will spend months trying to decide on a name for a new car, or a new lipstick shade. They will endlessly test these names on panels of punters, looking for feel good responses and weeding out negative word-associations. This is why you don't get a new model of family saloon called the "Rusticator", or a new lipstick called "Puking Pink". But whatever name is chosen, you can be sure that it's never difficult to say.

You'll not have failed to notice, though, that malt whisky is too long in the tooth, too honoured in its traditions, to succumb to such slick and namby-pamby notions. Malt whisky seems to take the exact opposite course, and you might even have come to the conclusion that if you can't pronounce it, it's bound to be a cracker. Can you think of another product of international standing which resolutely stays 50 percent unpronounceable, defying potential customers to place an order?

Some of these names are covered by arcane, one-off rules of pronunciation. For example, there's one malt whisky which seems to involve the dreaded uvular fricative but doesn't, and another which doesn't seem to involve it but does. Glen Garioch, the eastern malt (distillery now closed) is pronounced "Glen Geerie" while Glenglassaugh from Banffshire (distillery mothballed) sounds like "Glenglassoch". You could almost say:

Glenglassaugh and Glen Garioch
Both sound distinctly eerioch...

Let us, though, pass on from the uv. fric. and tackle the Gaelic. If you're from outside Scotland and have trouble with the Gaelic it might be a comfort to know that 95 per cent of us who live here are in exactly the same position. However, the reason why so many malt distilleries have Gaelic names is that the Gaels were there first. So it's only fair after all: these are their place-names, and some of them are deeply poetic.

Allt-a' Bhainne is "the milk burn". Bruichladdich is "the bank on the shore". Dailuaine is the "the green meadow". Tomatin is the "juniper hillock". Caol Ila is the "Sound of Islay", the narrow waterway between Islay and Jura where the distillery stands. These names are too lovely to mangle carelessly.

But some of them, admittedly, are pretty daunting to first-time pronouncers. At this end of the phone, we in The Vaults have been bemused by some of your efforts, although we're always prepared to give marks for a good try. We have heard Clynelish pronounced to rhyme with hellish, and Mosstowie to rhyme with gooey. We have heard more versions of Laphroaig than there are barley grains in its malt bins. So here's a pronouncing guide to some of the trickier names, with the syllables you should emphasise give in italics. And may you order with renewed confidence.

Allt-a' Bhainne\talta vanya
Bruichladdich\tbrewich laddie
Bunnahabhain\tboona hahven
Caol Ila\t \tcal eela
Clynelish\t \tcline leash
Dailuaine\t \tdall oo-anga
Glenmorangie\tglen morrangey
Knockando\t \tnock andoe
Laphroaig\t \tle froig
Tamnavulin\ttamna voolin
Teaninich\t                tee annin ich
Tomatin\t \tte mahtin

* With thanks for guidance to Raghnall MacilleDhuibh, of the School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh: any inaccuracies being mine alone."

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