While listening to the once-in-a-generation syntactical stylings of the Republican presidential candidate on Wednesday—"She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn"—I began to wonder if we were on the cusp of a fascinating linguistic moment. The monkeys seemed to have their fingers poised above their keyboards, ready to generate the collected works of Shakespeare. Was Donald Trump on track to correctly correct Kamala Harris's pronunciation of her own name?
Sorry, that was a lot. Let's take a step back. It is well known by now that Donald Trump nicknames his political foes in ways that make them seem small, servile, irrelevant, incompetent, effete, or corrupt. It may be the skill in life that allows him to draw closest to the sensation we might ordinarily recognize as "joy." It's also not quite working out for him, at present, because he has met an opponent too inscrutable to demean with a single word. After electorally lethal hits such as "Crooked Hilary" and "Low-Energy Jeb," or even the slow-release effects of "Sleepy Joe," Trump has thus far only mustered "Laffin' Kamala" and "Lyin' Kamala" for the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. This was thin gruel, washed out by so many coconut-tree emoji in a grim memetic arms race.
Unable to land on a nickname, the Republican candidate has instead flopped around for alternate angles of attack. It's always dumb to ascribe too much intent to his rambling, like writing a musicological treatise about the sound of a passerby farting, but his overall aim appears to be to characterize Harris as rootless and cynical, an opportunist springing for the supposed "DEI hire" perks of blackness. At Wednesday's panel with the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump openly wondered whether the biracial Harris had at some point stopped identifying as Indian and "happened to turn black." It was as if his brain dredged up the "Pocahontas" playbook he ran on Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2016 and attempted it again under heat-stroke conditions. As with many casually tossed-off Trumpisms, lifeforms lower on the MAGA food chain took it as a formal strategic directive. I don't think this one really has much juice.
But Trump was already riffing in this mode last week, while speaking at an event in West Palm Beach, when he tried to ridicule the pronunciation of Harris's first name. "By the way, there are numerous ways of saying her name," he said. "They were explaining to me, you can say COM-ma-la, you can say ka-MAH-la, I said, 'Don't worry about it, it doesn't matter what I say, I couldn't care less if I mispronounce it or not.' Some people think I mispronounce it on purpose, but actually I've heard it said about seven different ways."
Trump, through no insight of his own, has tottered blind into genuinely interesting territory. Harris is the child of a Tamil mother, and her given name Kamala, which is derived from the Sanskrit word for "lotus," is extremely common. I have known several people named Kamala; in all those cases, I heard the same pronunciation, which is different from the one Harris now employs. In interviews with Indian media over the years, Harris's maternal aunt Sarala Gopalan has pronounced "Kamala" as I have always heard it pronounced by local and diasporic Indians: come-a-la, with a schwa in the first syllable, and a second syllable so short it almost vanishes entirely.
Harris's own pronunciation is different enough that it took me aback when I first heard her say it. She opts for COM-ma-la, starting with an open front unrounded vowel, and a very strong stress on that first syllable, followed by second and third syllables of roughly even length. In a 2016 campaign ad, Harris's camp had a bunch of kids mock the various possible mispronunciations of "Kamala" before introducing her preferred pronunciation—which, again, doesn't align exactly with the way some of her family members might pronounce it.
As someone who also has an Indian name and uses a slightly modified pronunciation for ease of operation in America, I am sympathetic to Harris's situation. Many English speakers struggle with the rolled "r" in the middle of my name. Depending on the expected duration of our conversation—however long it takes to blend and hand over a smoothie, for instance—I might approximate the "r" with a "d" sound, or just give them my last name, instead of running through a full tutorial. I like hearing about how people's names have conditioned their behavior or worldview, so much so that my colleague and I made a whole podcast about it.
I came out of those interviews with a deeper commitment to a general principle: We're all free to pronounce our own names as we see fit, and I'll always be curious to learn the underlying reasons. It could be a purely aesthetic choice. There could be socially or politically expedient reasons to tweak a name that was stamped on your birth certificate without your input, by someone who might have belonged to a different culture than the one in which you were raised. That said, there are a few funny things at play here. As we once explored in a Namedropping interview with the comedian, mathematician and lay linguist Sridhar Ramesh, it's hard to grasp the logic in Kamala's case. In the traditional pronunciation, there's a schwa in the first syllable of her name. That vowel sound occurs all over the English language; think about the first syllable in "again" or "alone." Hell, look at "the." It's a sound that should be readily accessible to all those American English speakers that Harris hopes to court without phonetically inconveniencing. You really don't have to go out of your way to avoid it, but avoid it she has.
Whereas I, rightly or wrongly, have adopted a kind of anything-goes policy with non-expert pronunciation of my name, because I know I'm sort of bastardizing it in many contexts anyway, Harris has sometimes adopted a salty tone while policing its pronunciation. Perhaps this is the difference between a private citizen seeking a smoothie and a public figure seeking the presidency: A lax and self-effacing approach doesn't really serve her purposes. She has to plant a flag firmly, even if that flag is somewhere different than where the majority of Kamalas worldwide have planted theirs. By contrast, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, who until Monday was in contention to become Harris's running mate, is also a secret schwa-haver—but he hasn't bothered to enforce it for years, as detailed in an interview last year with WRAL News. The pronunciation of his surname is specific to his region of eastern North Carolina. "Only a very small percentage of people say Cuh-per," Cooper said. "Most people say Cooh-per, and when I went to college and would say my name, people struggled to know what it was. I don't have that problem anymore. Most people say Cooh-per, and I'm fine with that."
In that instance, Cooper was colliding with an immovable obstacle: widespread American familiarity with a different pronunciation of "Cooper." He would have had to confront the Cooh-per bloc in his every passing interaction, and it's easy enough to understand why he might have abandoned the fight and accepted all pronunciations. Harris, meanwhile, faces no analogous obstacle with "Kamala." Very few potential voters would have met any Kamalas before encountering her. When she rose to national prominence, most Americans were hearing the name for the first time, and they arrived with a decent grasp on the English word "come." I would love to know the full arc of Harris's lifetime pronunciation journey, as the present version strikes me as unorthodox without fully optimizing for American convenience, either. What needle was she looking to thread? "It's sort of weird to get up on the cross about people mispronouncing your name, but then give them this semi-anglicized, or semi-whatever, name," Ramesh pointed out in our interview. Maybe she just likes the way it sounds. If I had to float a theory: This alternate pronunciation allows her name to rhyme with her late mother's name, Shyamala, in a way that the "authentic" pronunciation of Kamala would not.
The twists and turns of this linguistic subplot have left me alone on this planet with this profoundly stupid thought: What if he randomly gets it right? What if, while seeking to alienate blood-and-soil Americans from the exotic and duplicitous Kamala Harris, Donald Trump shuffles through so many different versions of her name that he lands on the authentic pronunciation? "Come-a-la," he says on the debate stage, doing the accordion hands and constricting his voice to a squeak, aiming for derision but landing on a standard South Indian accent. What if that pronunciation catches on among the red-hatted masses, such that they and my grandma converge on the same vowel sounds? It's a demented vision, but also, somehow, a soothing one, showing how so much wrongness might inevitably produce a moment of tiny, unintentional rightness. I can only look on in disbelief as the monkeys bang out "Two households, both alike in dignity."
