How to say ‘Kamala’ — and why it makes a difference

Before Kamala Harris was on the national stage, the only famous Kamala whom Kamala Kanneganti had ever heard of was from a 1992 episode of Star Trek.

Growing up in Michigan, Kanneganti used to sometimes go by nicknames like Kammi or KK, instead of saying “Kamala” when she met someone. Now, though, when she introduces herself, she has a different method.

“Once she started running for president, and VP, I could go, ‘Kamala like Harris,’ and it’s now the offhand way I say it,” Kanneganti said.

As Harris has risen up in the political world, the name Kamala is getting more airtime — and more attention from her political opponents, who often pronounce it incorrectly.

Harris has long been familiar with educating her various audiences and potential voters about how to say her name. It was a part of her Senate campaign ads. In 2017, she explained it on the podcast The Axe Files:

“There are many ways. If you were asking my grandmother, she’d say, ‘KUH-muh-lah.’ I usually help people pronounce it by saying, ‘Well, just think of a comma and add a “la” at the end,'” Harris said.

Since she has become vice president and now the Democratic nominee for president, Harris’ first name is becoming ubiquitous. It has also been appearing more in popular entertainment over the years.

In the show Ms. Marvel, there’s Kamala Khan (pronounced Ka-MALA). In Mindy Kaling’s show Never Have I Ever, actress Richa Moorjani plays a character also named Kamala.

Moorjani says she decided to pronounce her character’s name as “KUH-muh-lah,” how the name is traditionally said in India, because the character had just immigrated to the United States.

But not every character in the show got it right. Moorjani suggested that in one scene, when her boss is introducing her to colleagues at her new job, he should mispronounce her name.

“She corrects him, and he still mispronounces it, which is something we all go through, all the time,” Moorjani said.

Moorjani told NPR that even though her character pronounced her name in the traditional way, it would make sense for others to say their names differently, depending on where they’re from — something she did for her character Indira in the show Fargo.

“I made a conscious decision that my character would actually pronounce her name as ‘in-DEER-ah,’ which is how everybody in the show pronounces it,” she said, “because she’s from a small town in Minnesota and has a Minnesotan accent, and it wouldn’t make sense for her to be like, ‘Hi, I’m from Minnesota. My name is IN-dira.”

Fictional or not, Moorjani says how people choose to say their own name is personal — and should be respected.

“We all do this in real life — we all code-switch,'” Moorjani said.

“There’s a stigma towards people who have grown up outside of the motherland who do pronounce their names a little bit differently than how it might be pronounced back home or by their families, and I do think it’s unfair because everyone grows up in such a different circumstance,” she added.

But on the campaign trail, Harris’ name has been mispronounced intentionally by former President Donald Trump. He and other Republicans have regularly incorrectly referred to her as “ka-MALA” or “Camilla” and have mocked her name in other ways. At a rally in July, for example, he made a point of saying he didn’t care about the pronunciation.

“They were explaining to me, ‘You can’t say “ka-MALA” — you can say “COMMA-la.”‘ I said, ‘Don’t worry about it — I couldn’t care less if I mispronounce it. I couldn’t care less,'” he told the crowd.

Singling out Harris’ first name is a way to “other” her, said Myles Durkee, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.

“When you intentionally mispronounce someone’s name who’s less traditional in the American context, it’s almost a dog whistle to othering that person, trying to suggest they’re less American, that they’re less worthy of you saying their name correctly in the first place,” he said.

Durkee said probably a lot of people in the U.S. who hadn’t heard the name Kamala before might inadvertently pronounce it “ka-MALA” instead of “COMMA-la.”

But Trump repeatedly saying Kamala wrong is a different story. Durkee called it a microaggression and noted it’s something conservatives did with former President Barack Obama’s name too.

“Particularly on Fox News, Barack Obama’s name was butchered left and right, and they also focused on his middle name, Hussein,” Durkee said.

Harris herself hasn’t really responded to Trump’s rhetoric about her name — nor has she to any of the attacks on her biracial identity.

But Harris’ husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, has.

He told a crowd at a recent event that if Trump keeps having trouble saying Harris’ first name, he has a solution. “Here’s the good news: After November, you can call her ‘Madam President,'” Emhoff said.

The Harris campaign has no intention of shying away from using her first name. It’s actually doing the opposite. In the short time it’s had, it has rebranded to “KAMALA HQ” online and printed signs with the vice president’s first name.

NPR’s Linnea Anderson and Jordan-Marie Smith contributed to this report.