How to pronounce Sotomayor

In this article, Mark Krikorian of the National Review exhorts people to stop pronouncing Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's last name with the primary accent falling on the final syllable, as it would be pronounced in Spanish and as the nominee herself pronounces it. Instead, he recommends Americanizing it, changing it from Sòtomayór to Sótomayor.

Why should we do this, according to Krikorian?

Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there's a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.

Of course, Sotomayor is not the one insisting that everyone else pronounce her name the way she does (or if she does, she has not publicly chided the media for frequent Anglicization of her name). Moreover, Sotomayor is not a newcomer. She is of Puerto Rican descent and was born in the United States. If she chooses to continue to pronouncing her last name the way her ancestors did, that is of course her right. And it is up to those of us who refer to her to decide about how much we wish adhere to her pronunciation, as is always the case with dealing with foreign names and words. Some will automatically defer to how the source of the name or word pronounces it, others will seek to have the word conform to the prosody (roughly "speech melody and rhythm") and phonotactics (how sounds can(not) combine in a language) of whatever language they are speaking. To insist that people choose one or the other is both pointless and intrusive. As the name gets batted around more and more, eventually a normative pronunciation or two will emerge and language will take care of itself.