You are probably saying 'IKEA' wrong, but it doesn't really matter

How do you say ‘IKEA’? Sorry, you’re probably wrong.

Australians putting a local spin on (read: completely mangling) the pronunciation of frequently used words from other languages isn’t a new thing – see ‘Mt Kosciusko‘ and ‘espresso‘, for starters. And there’s our approach to commonly used English words like ‘vulnerable’, ‘government’ and ‘probably‘. But IKEA, consisting of exactly four letters, seems harder to stuff up. Or is it?

Well, we’re in good company. The Americans say it the way we do – in fact, we probably picked it up from them. When the company established its US presence in 1985 they anticipated locals mispronouncing the name and decided to embrace it. 

“The decision was, ‘Let’s go with it and let people pronounce it the way they are going to pronounce it,” Marty Martson, the product public relations officer at IKEA US, told ABC news.

There was even an early American billboard with an eyeball, key, and a person saying ‘ah’.

“We want people to be happy with the product they get and they can pronounce in the way they feel most comfortable pronouncing it,” Martson said.

So, how do you say it in Swedish? Instead of eye, it’s a long ‘e’ sound at the front and the emphasis falls on the second syllable.

For clarification, below is a helpful vine. And don’t worry, apparently we’re pretty close to right on ‘Aldi’.