Why Do A Lot Of Americans Pronounce

Why do a lot of Americans mispronounce the names Iran and Iraq, but have no problem pronouncing Italy and India?

Those are the English names of those countries. Every language has their own names for the word’s countries. For example, Finnish calls the United States with the name Yhdysvallat. On the other hand, English calls Suomi with the name Finland. Do you think those are some kind of mistakes?Nevertheless, if Americans tried to pronounce Iraq as natives, they most likely couldn’t do it. The first sound in the Arabic name of Iraq is not the vowel [i], but a consonant that is hard to pronounce if you aren’t a native Arabic speaker. Those whose language doesn’t have this sound perceive only the vowel after the initial consonant.Then, why do Americans pronounce the initial vowels differently in those four names. That’s because in the words Italy and India the first sound is what is called the short i in English, and in the words Iran and Iraq the sound is called the long i which is a diphthong, produced as [aj] in English. Technically, the i of Italy could be long as well, and Iraq and Iran can very well be realised with the short i.

Why do the Americans pronounce Iran and Iraq I-ran and I-raq. But don't do the same for Italy?

Not all Americans pronounce those names the way you indicated. The stress on the first syllable is a regional marker of the American South, and may also indicate a low level of education. The southern pronunciation of In’surance is a similar regional marker. Since the advent of network television and especially network news, regional accents have gradually been replaced by a standard American pronunciation, making it increasingly difficult to place Americans regionally by accent.

Do Americans pronounce “ant” and “aunt” the same way?

Most of them do, but in some corners of the country they don’t:What this reflects is an earlier split back in England, the so-called Trap-bath split. England is nowadays divided in half by an isogloss that divides the country into two dialect regions depending on how you pronounce the ‘a’ vowel in words like bath and path. Words north of that line are pronounced like cat /kæt/ while words south of that line are pronounced like father /fɑðər/:How does this relate to America? Well, the earliest colonies in America were settled by people from all over England and Scotland (and later Ireland), but people tended to go to places where they already had contacts — family, friends, and coreligionists. Many of the middle colonies like Pennsylvania and New Jersey were settled by people from the north and west of England, while New England and the Tidewater South were settled more frequently by people from the south and east of England. When these people moved across the Pond, they brought their accents with them. This resulted in different parts of America being influenced by different parts of the old country, and explains the pattern you see in the American dialect map above because when those Americans moved west, only some of those regions adopted the /ɑ/ vowel instead of the older, more frequent /æ/ vowel.On top of that, things were changing back home. Until relatively late, the southern English pronunciation was actually considered rather uncouth — pronouncing path with the vowel of father was considered distinctly Cockney and working-class. It was only later that its prestige increased (the inverse happened with ain’t, which had an aristocratic flavor). Slowly, starting in the late 19th century, this sound-change started moving northward, but its progress never came to completion, and because it proceeded not just geographically but also word by word throughout the lexicon, some words were affected while others were not. So to this day many people of northern England and Scotland maintain the original /æ/ vowel for these words.So the bottom line is that in earlier centuries most or all English speakers pronounced these two words like modern ‘ant’, and it was only later that one of them shifted, and this other /ɑ/-pronunciation did not spread throughout the colonies as far as the older /æ/-variant did.

Why do Americans pronounce the word pasta as pah-sta?

Firstly, my unprofessional opinion is USians do not pronounce it the way that Italians do. And neither do Britons. IMHO Italians say it with a vowel sound somewhere in between that both flavours of Anglophone rarely manage to achieve.Forvo - Italians pronounce pasta in Italian (just two examples for ‘pasta’ alone so check out the longer phrases for a slightly more representative sample)Forvo - Anglophones pronounce pasta in English (note especially Jollysunbro’s long ah of the US type I think the OP is referring to)As the source language’s vowels don’t map exactly to English and its vowel patterns, how to say the stressed a in pasta and Bianca in English is a bit up for grabs as people reach for sounds that they do use in their mother tongue. (And there’s no “Royal Academy of the English Language” to settle the matter one way or the other.)To show the phenomenon happening the other way round, listen to the variety of vowels used by Italians saying the word “club” (not just variety from speaker to speaker: even individual speakers give more than one way of pronouncing it), as the original sound in English just doesn’t map to one of Italian’s standard vowels.As to why the US went one way and the UK the other, I don’t know but my suspicion is that Britons often seem to absorb loanwords more completely into English speech patterns whereas USians seem to keep loanwords a bit more foreigny (famous examples include a lot of words originally from French like garage, salon, fillet, which tend to be pronounced more Frenchified in the US but are more nativized in the UK); or to hyperforeignize them (e.g. USians often inserting an ñ into habanero or pronouncing Chávez with an sh- instead of ch-). But I am, at best, generalizing and I have no scientific basis for this. (But hey, it’s the post-truth internet! Who needs evidence?!)Regardless, as a half-Italian, half-USian who grew up in Britain, I will continue to savour my pasta as both sides say “our incorrect way of pronouncing it is righter than your incorrect way of pronouncing it!”