Why Do We Say 'Baloney' Instead Of 'Bologna?'

Despite its foreign-looking name, few deli meats are as American as bologna, the so-called mystery meat in the middle of every student's lunch sandwich. Just as all-American is how the word is pronounced in the U.S. Most other countries will read "bologna" as "boh-LOH-nya," which is how Bologna — its namesake city in Northern Italy — is pronounced. However, we more often hear "buh-LOW-nee" among Americans, and sometimes even spell it out as "baloney" to match. So how did this quirk of the language come about?

One popular theory is that baloney is an evolution of how immigrants from Southern Italy may have pronounced bologna. A 2007 study presented at the 16th International Congress of Phonetics Sciences found that Southern Italian speakers had significantly shorter closed vowel sounds than speakers from Northern Italy and other regions. Some Southern Italian languages, like those found in the Campania region, also tend to soften or altogether drop their ending vowels. Combine that with the American accent favoring an "auh" sound for the letter o, and it's easy to see how "boh-LOH-nya" would become "buh-LOW-nee."

These linguistic features of certain Southern Italian dialects could also explain why some Italian Americans pronounce a number of other words differently than how they're spelled. It's possible this — along with a hardening of some consonant sounds — is why manicotti became "manny-GOAT," prosciutto became "bruh-SHOOT," and mozzarella became "moot-ZAH-rell." The most notorious of these, of course, is good old "gabagool," which is an Americanized pronunciation of capicola, also known as capocollo or coppa.

In a 2021 Huffington Post article, linguist Mark Liberman theorized baloney simply follows a pattern where the ending "ia" sound in Italian is replaced with "y" in English. While the source of this pattern is up for debate, some signs point to a different country altogether: France. In 1066, William the Conqueror took control of England, bringing with him the French language. Because of his rule, an estimated 30% of the English language today comes from French origins.

The "-ia to -y" pattern may have emerged from the French words for Italian cities. Lombardia, for example, is known as "Lombardie" in French, which could have led to the English "Lombardy." Similarly, "Italia" became "Italie" in French, giving English "Italy." In the case of Bologna, the French "Bologne" has a barely-there vowel sound at the end, which may have evolved into just the "y" sound in English. We see examples of it in other French places that end in "-gne" — "Bretagne" is "Brittany" in English, and Gascogne is "Gascony." Bourgogne had a few more changes before it became "Burgundy," which English speakers might recognize as the home of some of the world's best Pinot Noir.

Why this pattern persists for some places and not others — we call Campania by its Italian name despite the French calling it "Campanie" — isn't clear, but people do tend to stick with pronunciations they hear more often. In an Oscar Mayer bologna ad from the 1970s, a kid sings the word as "buh-LOW-nee," but the closing voiceover says "buh-LOW-na." Clearly, we kept the pronunciation from the commercial's catchier part.