Wilkes-Barre: how do you you say it?

The city of Wilkes-Barre is only about a hundred miles north of where I've been living in the Philadelphia area for the past half century, but I've never had the slightest clue about how the name should be pronounced.  My guess has always been that it is something like "wilks-bare", but I've always been uncomfortable with that stab in the dark.

Now we have a thorough accounting of the toponymic pronunciation problem from "The Diamond City" by the Susquehanna itself:

"How should Wilkes-Barre be pronounced? Are you sure about that?" By Roger DuPuis, Times Leader (8/5/22)

The story begins way back in the middle of the 18th century with the founding of the city.

For those who don’t already know, Wilkes-Barre was laid out in 1769, when the region was still claimed by Connecticut and part of the British Empire. Its namesakes are the Rt. Hon. John Wilkes and Isaac Barré, members of the British Parliament who were sympathetic toward the American colonists.

Wilkes, arguably the more famous of the two, was a London-born radical who spent much of his younger life antagonizing the establishment, earning the enmity of King George III and other high-ranking members of British society.

Barré, meanwhile, was born in Dublin, Ireland to French Huguenot refugees. Despite his French roots, he was raised in Anglo-Irish society, served in the British Army, and later became a member of Parliament. There, Barré was an ardent supporter of the American cause.

Wilkes-Barré Preservation Society director and curator Tony Brooks, who has spent many years studying the issue, said we cannot know for sure how Barré pronounced his own name, but that even in his own time it likely would have been anglicized by the people around him in Ireland and England, sounding more like “berry” than “ba-rrray,” despite continued use of the accent aigu (é) over the e. In French, that letter sounds like “ay” or “eh.”

So, how would Wilkes-Barré have been pronounced in early America?

Brooks has found evidence that battles over the spelling and pronunciation go way back.

In 1829, the Wyoming Bank of Wilkes-Barré passed a resolution at the time of its founding that specified spelling as you see here, complete with hyphen, capital B, and the accent aigu over the e, to point to what they saw as its proper pronunciation. That, he said, suggests that the spelling and pronunciation were controversial even then, 60 years after the community was first formed.

The é persisted into the 20th century. Brooks pointed to several instances, including a check issued by the then-Borough of Wilkes-Barré in 1861….

The author traces the orthography of the name through centuries of history, with the main bones of contention being whether to capitalize the "B/b", whether to hyphenate the name, whether to fuse the two names into one, whether to write "e" or "é", and so on. 

Then we jump to the present and survey the voices of what the locals are saying now for the name of the city they themselves live in.

The people we chatted with on and around Public Square offered the usual variations: “bear,” “bar,” “barra,” or “berry.”

Even [Chris] Bohinski, a native of Wilkes-Barre Township who has always said “berry,” admits his own father sometimes said “bear.”

One group of G.A.R. Memorial Middle School students we encountered on the square admitted that they, too, used to vary in their pronunciations, until they took a tour with Brooks and learned the name’s history and proper pronunciation.

“Wilkes-BERRY” they shouted in unison.

Mayor George Brown, a lifelong resident, agreed.

“We have people mispronounce it all the time,” Brown said. “We’ve had people perform at the F.M. Kirby Center and pronounce it the wrong way. I’ll stand up and say, ‘hey, I’m the mayor, and it’s Wilkes-BERRY.”

All are welcome regardless, he added.

“Whether you call it Wilkes-BERRY or Wilkes-BAR or Wilkes-BEAR, come on out, because it’s a great city,” Brown said.

Given that the indigenes pronounce the name of their city in so many different ways, I think that I'll just continue to say it as I always have, "wilks-bear / bare".  No more orthoepic qualms over Wilkes-Barre.

 

Selected readings

• "Local toponymic pronunciations in northwestern Ohio and northern Indiana" (7/4/22)
• "Southern Ohioisms" (9/23/17)
• "The many sights and sounds of 'Buchanan'" (8/26/21)

 

[h.t. Barbara Phillips Long]