How would you pronounce this name...

ah you're with me then ken

A couple of my friend's children are Aoibhinn and one is Aiveen. They all, and my family (Armagh) pronounce it more Ayvean than anything.

:o

You should hire a PA and stand outside the City Hall in Belfast saying prayers in Irish.

I worked for an Irish company and lived in UK. Our MD would say that if I spoke to the rest of the board in Irish I was like Ian Paisley...lilting I'm not

No, you did guess wrong.

-eann is a broad vowel sound, even people in Kerry can't magically transform it into a narrow vowel sound without pronouncing it wrong.

As has already been pointed out, if you want to pronounce it Ee-veen, you need to spell it Aoibhinn.

Although it is hard to imagine why anyone would choose a name as slight and ugly as that.

Perry - Ian Paisley speaking Irish - that I would like to hear :o

Evan? Have not read thread...

sorry if u think i guessed wrong mrs irish speaker but in the kingdom of kerry it'd be eve-een thank you

Phew..wondered if we were all mad or speaking Irish with an Ian Paisley accent perhaps

Actually WeShould is right - Aoibhinn could legitimately be pronounced Ee-veen, depending on accent.

I would pronounce that as Eev-inn, same as I pronounce the word binn like bin.

But some people would pronounce that narrow vowel sound as ee, eg. binn as been (particularly in Ulster dialect) and that is perfectly fine.

Aoibheann uses a broad vowel sound, so there is no way it can end in een.

And Perry is right too, that the broad vowel sound in Aoibheann has a particular sound to that is broader than just Even would allow. But the closest you'll get when people are speaking English is Even.

I hope you guys have some idea what I'm talking about. Irish sounds in English are hard to represent well. :)

Thanks, SheCutOffTheirTales!

PerryCombover, 'eann' or 'ainn' is always just a neutral 'en' sound, unless there's a fada lengthening one of the vowels. So Siobhán is pronounced 'ShuvAUN' because of the síne fada on the 'a', but Aoibheann (or Aoibhinn' as it's sometimes spelled) are 'EE-ven', because t doesn't have one.

As SheCutOffTheirTales said, though, Ireland isn't immune from people inventing their own variant spellings to Irish names, especially if Irish is a dim and distant memory from their schooldays! If you actually speak it, though, the variant spellings/pronunciations become a lot weirder, because names like Aoibheann are also just ordinary words - 'Aoibheann' means beautiful or lovely, so you can't just reinvent it!

ee from the Aoi and v from the bh and aan

i'm still getting eev aan

It is not correctly pronounced Ayveen, although some Irish people do mispronounce it.

The correct way to say it is Even.

Or if you spell Aoibhinn, then Eeveen/Eevin

Aoi makes a beautiful sound, but the closest in English is ee

Ayveen would be spelled Eabhaoin (or something)

Aoibheann is a standard word, there is no way to make those letters make the sound Ayveen.

I thought it was Aay (to rhyme with Bay vean).

Ay veen or ee veen

I am Irish and have a couple of friends with this name

HardCheese I live in NI, so Irish names are familiar to some people but pretty alien to others.

DH is English, so in-law issues around name pronunciation.

Both my DDs have (quite rare, but not unheard of) Irish names. I picked them to be easily pronounced by non-Irish speakers.

I don't like the name Aoibheann anyway, but I would not have used a name that had the same sound as an English word. I think the child called Even is the worst part if the burden - people can learn to spell and pronounce things as long as there are no difficult sounds eg no way would I choose Cathal, although in Ireland it would be fine.

Congratulations on your pregnancy :)

This is my aunt's name and she pronounces it e von or ev von
agghhhhh

SheCutOffTheirTails and WeShouldOPenaBar - are you both Irish people living in the UK? Have you given your children Irish names and found that there was mass pronunciation difficulties? Am Irish, pregnant with my first, but not sure whether it will grow up mostly in Ireland or in England, and that will probably have an impact on our choice of names. Would be interested to hear your experience, if relevant.

I'm Irish, and it's pronounced more or less exactly like 'Even'. It means 'lovely' or 'beautiful'.

if you want it to end een you need to change it to aoibhinn , but agree with shecutofftheirtails, everyone i know with an irish name has huge problems in the uk, even aoife which i would have thought is an easy enough one has proved problematic

It doesn't have an -een ending, it has an -en or -an ending.

In English it sounds too much like "even" to sound attractive.

Also interesting that everyone on this thread so far (other than me, and I speak Irish) has guessed wrong.

This name would be a burden to an English child. Would you call your daughter Even? It's really just a complicated way of spelling it.

Reminds of the Vicar of Dible joke - "Did your mother have something against consonants?"

I would have said that Eveen, or Aveen. Tis lovely, but there would be a lot of spelling it out for people - unless you live in Ireland of course.

It probably sounds lovely but looks like someone has dropped a load of Scrabble tiles.

oops i meant ee vagn or eve von ime