Convenience Big Store: What's the correct way to say 'bayou'?

October 11, 2024

Hank Williams was seen in the Ken Burns documentary

What is the correct way to say 'bayou'? We asked a linguist and put on a Hank Williams song

Having tried to address a functional definition of a bayou last week, I'll pivot here to a related subject I was asked about, which yields a comparable muddiness.

How are you supposed to pronounce the word "bayou"?

Both BUY-oo and BUY-oh have their legions. Both are heard with regularity in Houston.

Is one correct?

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The origin of 'bayou'

I talked with Dr. Nathalie Dajko, a linguist in the anthropology department at Tulane University. She says the word's Choctaw and French origins should clarify its pronunciation: BUY-oo.

But she's aware of regional permutations that complicate matters. She was excited to get a call from Houston because she has a friend here who insists it's pronounced BUY-oh.

"How do you say it?" she asked me.

BUY-oo, I said

She mentions another permutation that fits the pronunciation my wife heard as a kid growing up in northeast Arkansas. The second syllable is almost swallowed, yielding a word suspended between one and two syllables. It's almost like BAOH.

Reddit threads are full of other people from the Mississippi Delta — a swath of land between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers that runs from the Bootheel of Missouri south to Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico.

They claim BUY-oh is prevalent.

So, could BUY-oh and BAOH be kissing cousins?

Per Dajko's request, I contacted a friend from Hattiesburg, Miss., and one from Monroe, La. Both towns are outside the delta. Both say BUY-oo.

How Hank Williams changed how we say 'bayou'

Regarding BUY-oh, we must consider what Dajko calls "the lasting influence of Hank Williams." Williams, an Alabama native, didn't hail from the Delta.

This Delta permutation may have enabled Williams, the country music legend from Alabama, to lean into BUY-oh for his hit "Jambalaya (on the Bayou)."

Williams wrote the song, probably with assistance from Moon Mullican, an under-heralded country singer from the Big Thicket in East Texas.

Considering the number of words, non-words and names in the song with a long-O sound — me-oh-my-oh, Joe, fillet gumbo, Thibodaux, Fontenot — the musicians may have wielded some phonetic license.

Their theatrical flair then got passed down: Little Richard sings "BYE-oh" on his "Born on the Bayou," and Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers Band went with "BYE-oh" in "Ramblin' Man." Just to be geographically diligent: Little Richard is from Georgia; Dickey Betts from Florida.

But Fats Domino, a New Orleans native, mumbles the word in his cover of "Jambalaya," probably to preserve some semblance of the rhyme scheme without completely uprooting the French roots of his culture.

And if we trace the path of bayou, the word, back to its headwaters, we travel, in fact, back to France.

Dajko confirms consensus that the term was a French permutation of "bayuk," a Choktaw term for a small waterway.

"Even with all the places that say BUY-oo, there's still some lack of confidence in the etymology," she says. "However, generally everybody agrees it's Choctaw. The French just dropped the 'k' at the end."

Houston's melting pot nature and its rapid growth guarantee no consensus here.

After discussing vowels in French and English and regional variations on the sounds of "o" and "ou," Dajko pivots to Dad jokes, readily available to linguists.

"With bayou, if we move beyond pronunciation, there's the question: Do you know what the loneliest bayou is?"

I do not.

"Bayouself."

(Cue drum rim shot sound.)

But also … She said BUY-oo-self.