I'm listening to an audiobook set in the west of Ireland and the narrator is pronouncing 'gardai' as guard-i

[BlackAmericanoNoSugar]

Is that a thing? I say guard-ee as does everyone I've ever heard. The book is The Existential Worries of Mags Munroe and the narrator is Siobhan Waring. I've googled her and she is British but clearly has some Irish connection judging by her first name, and her Irish accent sounds reasonable to me if not exactly the same as any of the few people that I know from rural Galway (who all sound different to each other).

The book is pretty good so far, although the plot hasn't quite kicked off yet. The blurb says that 'something unthinkable happens' and it hasn't so far, but the characters are relatable and the background story building is very good.

I'm from Galway and I've only ever hear gard ee said anywhere around the country.

I've listened to audio books and podcasts set in/relating to Germany, and the butchering of pronunciation actually made me stop listening to some of them.

?

I heard
The Colour Purple read and I was distracted because one of the characters was pronounced sug. Like sugs singular. Whereas in my head I'd assumed it was a shortened form of the endearment Sugar.
So should be pronounced Shug.
?

I listened to an audiobook recently which was set in Germany with German characters, but with very British accents and language (“the locals in Freidorf have diddly squat”). It was really weird.

Sorry for the tangent OP. I don’t know about this pronunciation. But I empathise with the way an odd pronunciation can really mess with listening to a book!

The plural is gardaí (gard ee) and the singular is Garda (gard eh) so that could be why?

I think I'm going to stick with the story, although unfortunately the main character is in the gardai so the word does get mentioned now and then which is a bit jarring. Weirdly, the narrator can say Garda Siochana completely perfectly, which is surely a lot more difficult than gardai.

I did have to stop listening to a book previously that had a narrator with a cut glass English accent. She had clearly been asked if she could do an Irish accent because when she spoke dialogue she did it in an absolutely perfect Belfast accent, unfortunately the story was set in Dalkey/Glenageary/Killiney which undoubtedly has some NI origin residents but not ALL of them.

She says garda correctly, it's clear from context that she is using guard-i as the plural.

🤣

Perhaps I can share this video with the narrator, for future reference.

Dalkey , Glenageary , Killiney has far more cut glass English accents than it does Belfast , that's for sure.

Ps , I wonder if Gardaí is lacking its fada in the book?

What book had the story set in Dalkey / Glenageary / Killiney @BlackAmericanoNoSugar?

Yes , spill the tea! Mind you half the novels published since the Celtic Tiger -:RIP- are probably set in that area.

I can't remember the book that had that bit of Co Dublin fully inhabited by Belfast folk. I'm pretty sure that it was by Andrea Mara, but not All Her Fault because I read that one all the way through and I didn't listen to it. I can't even guess by looking at plot summaries because I think I only lasted about 10 minutes into the audio book before the narrator put me off. I was listening to it on Everand but they swap out books quite frequently and don't have any Andrea Mara audiobooks at the moment. I've listened to samples on Audible but they all have Irish narrators, except one which has an American narrator, so it's possible that they re-recorded all her books when she got more famous.