To ask when dachshunds became 'dash hounds'?

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I've always known their name to be pronounced 'dahks-hunts' or 'daks-hunds' - given it's a German word and all that. Suddenly though, I hear people with sausage dogs calling them 'dash-unds' or even 'dash-hounds'. When did this happen? Is there a reason for it, like when German shepherd dogs were temporarily rebranded as Alsatians?

Interesting! I have a friend who was born and raised in England but who has a Spanish mother and therefore speaks it fluently and it was the language spoken at home.

I always hear her pronounce words like jalapeño, paella, tortilla, etc. in a very anglicised way when speaking English. Obviously I'm sure she pronounces them properly when speaking Spanish!

I pronounce it the German way but I'm part of a dachsund meetup group and they're either dash hounds or sausages. I call mine sausage mostly.
When we first got him we bumped into a load of secondary school kids who sang the wiener dog song to him. That was strange.
He has a ginger bum and eyebrows but is a chocolate dapple and looks like he's had a tin of paint thrown at him.

Not a fan of the American version 'Doxies'

Definitely stubborn. He thinks he's a parrot on my shoulder and will happily totter off on a five mile walk.

Scariest, most aggressive dog I've ever come across was a chihuahua.

Well, ‘dacks-hund’ isn’t really correct either. Most English people aren’t going to be saying the German ‘ch’ correctly, even if they aren’t saying it ‘dash’. I wouldn’t feel too superior.

If you’re Senior Service then you don’t say “leftenant”.

I call them dachshunds. Am I weird?

I was just about to write the same thing!

With the sausage dogs, it's more like noticing for the first time that people are buying up Rottweiler pups and calling them Redwailers or something.

They pronounce it rott - wheeler in Australia, and consider them to big softies, not vicious brutes.

The British pronunciation of “lieutenant” stems from a similar misunderstanding. We mess up a lot of words. Even the Americans get that one right.

Re the OPs question about the timing of the 'dash hound' pronunciation - it's been commonplace for decades. We got our first dachshund in 1996 when people would comment 'ooh, you don't see many of those nowadays' and it'd be probably at least half of people then. We lost our second last year at nearly 17 so I've had quite a long period of observation. While there are definitely far more dachsies around now (probably too many, where are all these dapples coming from?), I'm not sure there's been an overall linguistic drift during this period.

However it may be more noticeable at this time of year because - well, just do an image search for 'dachshund through the snow'

Yes, people have trouble with the number of syllables as well as the w/v though

I know how to say it properly but I like to call them dash hounds

I call them dachshunds but my mum is Dutch and always referred to them with the properly pronounced name. I never heard the ‘dash’ version until recently. Everyone seemed to call them ‘sausage dogs’.

Stop looking if it offends so much.

Yes! The pitying look - 'Aww bless, you mean Moway?'

Thanks, this kind of thing is what I was wondering about (rather than wanting to parade around in my golden chariot feeling like the world's most superior Hochdeutsch dog-pronouncer, as one or two seem to have assumed!).

Isn't 17 pretty old for a sausage dog? How lovely that you had so long together.

When people stopped reading books and English became a purely aural and colloquial language, not based in learning or education at all. Take heart though, in ten years time even the word dash hound won't exist as it will have been universally replaced by a puppy emoji.

Isn't 17 pretty old for a sausage dog? How lovely that you had so long together.

Not too uncommon for minis, but he was a standard. Not such a dash-hound in the last few years of course but still the best of boys.

OMFG this annoys we so much as well. I feel like swiping back with ‘if you mean the utter shit you’re carrying which I’m only having because it’s marginally better than Prosecco then yes. Unless you’d rather I just took my money home and bought another actually good grower champagne for my cellar, of course’.

Moët is pleb champagne

Sho-low-itz-KWEENT-ly but I stick to sholo, not that it comes up all that often even working with dogs!

I wish people would move back to appreciating having words adapted into local pronunciation, at least in most instances. It's a normal part of language, makes for nice local colour, and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with it.

Weirdly we don't expect people speaking other languages to try and mangle English words in an English accent.

Weirdly we don't expect people speaking other languages to try and mangle English words in an English accent.

True... English spoken with some accents (French, Italian...) often sounds nicer than quite a few British/other anglophone accents.