Why is arkansas pronounced arkansas

Arkansas was a favorite spot for French explorers in the 17th and 18th centuries. It also was the home of many Native American Indian tribes.

According to the Arkansas secretary of state's website, the Quapaws were known as the "downstream people" by some tribes, and the Algonkian-speaking Indians of the Ohio Valley called them the Arkansas, or "south wind. There were different spellings of the names, with the French explorers applying their spelling to the Indian names.

In the journal of explorers Marquette and Joliet, they spelled the Indian name "Akansea. So, as you can see, from the beginning no one could agree on how to spell it, let alone pronounce it. You also can imagine that mixing French, Quapaw, Algonkian, and ultimately English, must created quite a conglomeration of spellings and pronunciations.

Finally, with statehood in , everyone settled on the spelling as "Arkansas. But, there still was a dispute of how to say it. The story goes that two U. In , the Legislature passed a resolution that the spelling would be "Arkansas" and the pronunciation "Arkansaw. Somehow, the English speakers that took over after the Louisiana Purchase decided to go with a modified French spelling along with a French pronunciation — an s on the page, but not on the tongue.

Incidentally, the name Ozark comes from French aux Arcs, short for aux Arcansas. And the same native word that became Wichita in Kansas went with the Frenchified spelling Ouachita in Arkansas. Actually, it took some time for Arkansans to come to agreement on pronunciation.

The Arkansas Historical Society members argued that the divergent pronunciations of Arkansas and Kansas stem from similar French names given to two different Native America tribes. A Siouan tribe lived near the modern-day Kansas River and early French explorers called them by a version of their name, which sounded to their French ears like "Kansa.

Those tribal names, as the French rendered them, look and sound very similar, but again, for reasons unknown, early French explorers wrote out the associated place names very differently.

Clearly, at some point an "r" was added to the original Algonquin name Akansa. One theory, mentioned in a article in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, is that the Akansa used a particularly cool bow when hunting and the French word for bow is "arc. Other French explorers called the Arkansas river "la riviere des arcs" "river of the bends" for its curvy course. Either example could explain why the French Colonel de Champigny, writing in , chose to call the region "Arckantas. Which brings us to the pronunciation question.

The Arkansas Historical Society pamphlet concluded that both Kansas and Arkansas have roots in similar Indian tribal names, but that Kansas chose to follow the standard English pronunciation — marked by the hard "a" sound in "can" and vocalizing the final "s" — while Arkansas stuck with the original French pronunciation. It's the long French and Italian "ah" sound, wrote the Arkansas Historical Society, which explains why Arkansas was sometimes spelled "Arkansaw," including in the peace treaty between the United States and the Quapaw.

The inclusion of the "s" at the end of Arkansas was likely a product of pluralization. If the tribe was called the Akansa, then multiple members of the tribe were the Akansas. But since the final "s" is silent in French, all that's left is the "ah" sound.