Anthony Albanese can't decide how to pronounce his name, so don't ask him
Updated
Politicians are known for dodging questions, though ordinarily the questions they dodge are more difficult than this one.
"I'm calling from ABC radio," I said to the unfortunate soul helming the phones at the Grayndler electoral office last week. Could Anthony Albanese, the soon-to-be leader of the Australian Labor Party, please confirm how he pronounces his own surname?
Brief silence on the line. In my experience, there are two ways this conversation usually proceeds. The most common outcome is for you to be put on hold briefly until the functionary returns with an approximate pronunciation, only to be increasingly unnerved by questions about stress placement and place of articulation.
The second outcome is that you're put through to the person themselves. This ordinarily only occurs with classical musicians, but if you're lucky it can happen with Jacinda Ardern.
But the approach taken by the Grayndler apparatchik was different again. A slight sharpness entered their voice — we were clearly not the first to ask about this — as they politely intoned words to the effect that the member had already answered this question previously, a transcript of his remarks was on their website, and would the ABC refer to those remarks previously stated.
After locating the interview in question (on 3AW, with Neil Mitchell) I soon realised the transcript itself would be of little help:
MITCHELL: And just one last thing for the record, how do we pronounce your surname?
ALBANESE: The correct way of course is Albanese. But you know Albanese is pretty close to it, but the Anglicisation of it of course is Albanese.
Mitchell wasn't the first to ask, and he wouldn't be the last.
Later that day, Waleed Aly opened an interview on the Project asking the same question.
On 2GB, Alan Jones and Ben Fordham both have struggled with it.
The confusion is perennial: in 2013, after some two decades in Australian public life, it was one of the Qs put to him live to air during an episode of Q&A.
A man of many names
Part of the reason for the confusion is that Mr Albanese has changed how he says his surname throughout the course of his own life.
In footage from early in his parliamentary career, he clearly pronounces his surname as though it rhymes with the word "ease". (In the International Phonetic Alphabet used by linguists, it might look something like /aelbniz/.)
This was most likely Albanese's preference prior to entering public life. As time went on, though, he began to accept other pronunciations, rhyming with "easy" and "Stacey". (For the IPA boffins in the back: /aelbnizi/, /aelbnesi/.)
Chalk it up to quality time with the Italian diaspora of Leichhardt, who may have insisted their local member use a more Romantic pronunciation.
In her her biography of the man, the journalist Karen Middleton attributes this shift in pronunciation to a form of political expediency: "Gradually, his pronunciation became more flexible, subtly adjusted as required to account for expectations."
When pressed by Neil Mitchell to decide on a single variant, or when introducing himself for a video on his own Facebook page, Mr Albanese today uses the rhyming-with-"easy" pronunciation: /aelbnizi/.
Happily, this is the guidance the ABC's pronunciation database has gone with since 2013.
Competing influences
None of this has stopped members of the public from complaining that Anthony Albanese is wrong about the pronunciation of his own surname. "Penny Wong and Tanya Plibersek say Albaneez," writes one to the ABC Language inbox, "it's either Albaneez or Albanayzee. NOT Albaneezee."
It's a sentiment echoed by more than one ABC radio presenter — and, for that matter, Christopher Pyne.
The argument seems to be that, as Albanese is an Italian surname, it should be pronounced as though it is an Italian word. This is a strange prescriptivism, the etymological fallacy at work.
As Mr Albanese told Waleed Aly, we don't say bolognese the way the Italians do — or malaria, or politico.
It's possible the Opposition leader feels conflicted about embracing an Italian surname, given his single-parent upbringing and dramatic, late-in-life, rendezvous with his father. (It also ignores that spoken Italian isn't entirely monolithic; there are many regional differences, including how the letter [s] is pronounced between vowels.)
With all the wisdom of Solomon, the member for Grayndler often suggests to interviewers that we cut the name in half and go with the hypocoristic form: Albo. But there are many, inside and out of the ABC, who'd take the view that such a form is far too cosy for the national broadcaster and might doom electoral politics in this nation to a contest between Teletubbic contractions, where ScoMo and MiMo face off against Albo and Marlo.
When it comes to Albanese, I'd suggest listening to the man himself: while he may have said one thing in the past, he today says al-buh-NEE-zee. So should we.
Topics: government-and-politics, federal-government, alp, anthony-albanese, australia
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