Why Isn't Arkansas Pronounced 'Ar-Kansas'?

Kansas and Arkansas are spelled similarly but pronounced very differently. Learn why in this episode of BrainStuff.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren vogebam here. Imagine you're an intrepid seventeenth century French
explorer transversing the expansive wilderness of Louisiana a k a
New France, a territory spanning the entire Mississippi basin from
modern day Louisiana through Illinois and northward into Canada. You

(00:23):
encounter dozens of native tribes, each with its own language
or dialect, and you attempt to record their names in
your journal as best you can. This imperfect system is
how English speaking Americans eventually arrived at many of their
names for Native American tribes, including the Dakota, Iowa, Alabama, Nebraska, Ottawa, Chippewa,
and Tuscaloosa. I think of it as a centuries long

(00:46):
game of multi lingual telephone. These words evolved from their
original pronunciation into a French approximation, and finally into an
anglicized mangling of the French, which brings us to the
legitimately confusing question of how the state of Kansas spelled
k A N S A S could be pronounced Kansas,
while the nearby state of Arkansas spelled a r K

(01:09):
A N S A S is pronounced Arkansas. This question
was a subject of a pamphlet published way back in
one titled Fixing the Pronunciation of the name Arkansas. The booklet,
written by members of the Arkansas Historical Society, was meant
to provide historical context to a resolution passed by the
Arkansas General Assembly declaring the one and only correct pronunciation

(01:33):
of Arkansas to quote, it should be pronounced in three syllables,
with the final S silent the A, and each syllable
with the Italian sound and the accent on the first
and last syllables, being the pronunciation formally universally and now
still most commonly used. Apparently, what happened was that some

(01:53):
egg heads at Webster's Dictionary had changed the entry for
Arkansas to include a new pronunciation note are Kansas formerly Arkansas,
and that sent red blooded Arkansas ins into a lexigraphical tizzy.
The authors of the Arkansas Historical Society pamphlet called it
a vicious pronunciation with no basis of reason, authority, or

(02:15):
prior polite usage. And moreover, people who said are Kansas,
according to the pamphlet quote failed to consider that they
would thus render ridiculous, a name highly poetiquet. It sounds
and associated with the grandest memories of the past, from
the days of Marquette downward, Marquette being the French explorer
Jacques Marquette. The Arkansas Historical Society members argued that the

(02:37):
divergent pronunciations of Arkansas and Kansas stem from similar French
names given to two different Native American tribes. A Sioux
tribe lived near the modern day Kansas River, and early
French explorers called them by an approximation of their name,
which sounded to French ears like Kansas. The second tribe,
the Quapa, lived further southwest along the modern day Arkansas River.

(03:01):
For reasons unknown, even though the Quapa spoke a Suan language,
the French called them by an Algonquin name Arkansas. Those names,
as the French rendered them, look and sound very similar,
but again for reasons unknown, early French explorers wrote out
the associated place names very differently. Explorer on Rijotel, writing

(03:23):
in seven wrote out the word for the area around
modern day Arkansas a C C A N C Sidilla
E A S, and he spelled Kansas C H A
N Z E S by seventeen twenty three, Arkansas was
routinely spelled the way it is today, but as late
as eighteen o five, French photographer Perin the Lack spelled

(03:46):
Kansas k A N c E with a grave accent s.
Clearly at some point in R was added to the
Algonquin name Arkansas. One theory mentioned in a nine article
in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly is that hunters from the
tribe used a particularly cool bow, and the French word
for bow is arc. Other French explorers called the Arkansas

(04:10):
River the river of arcs or bends for its curvy course,
so either admiration for the weapon or the term for
the river might have influenced the French pronunciation of the name,
which brings us to the pronunciation question. The eighty one
Arkansas Historical Society pamphlet concluded that eventually colonists in Kansas

(04:30):
chose to follow the standard English pronunciation, marked by a
hard A sound and vocalizing the final s, while Arkansas
colonists stuck with the original French pronunciation with a long
romance language ah sound. They noted that in the past,
Arkansas was sometimes spelled A R K N S A
W including in the eighteen peace treaty between the United

(04:54):
States and the Quapa, and they said that the inclusion
of the s at the end of the modern spell
was likely a product of pluralization. If the tribe was
called the Akinsaw, then multiple members of the tribe were
the Atkins Saws. But since the final S is silent
in French, all that's left is the awe sound. In
eighty the Arkansas Historical Society wrote the iconic American poet

(05:17):
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for his take on the pronunciation question.
He replied, I confess I prefer the sound of Arkansas
as being more musical than Arkansas. Case closed. Today's episode
was written by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clang
for iHeart Media and How Stuff Works. For more on

(05:39):
this and lots of other topics, visit our home planet,
how Stuff Works dot com.