Jacaranda season is upon us. But wait, how do you pronounce ‘jacaranda’?

Love them or hate them, jacarandas are back and in bloom.

One question that might come to mind as you’re pointing out how pretty they are, or complaining about the flowers falling all over your lawn — am I even saying that tree’s name right?

To answer this question, I put on my linguist hat and traced the word back to its origins.

The English pronunciation

You likely already know this one, or can guess it — “jack-uh-RAN-duh.”

This is the pronunciation in most English dictionaries, but many Spanish speakers bristle at the hard “j” sound. Overall, it’s not super close to the original pronunciation, but it turns out that people saying the word with a hard “j” sound are onto something. More on that soon.

The Spanish pronunciations

Yes, that’s pronunciations in the plural.

If you grew up seeing Mexico City’s iconic jacarandas in bloom, you likely pronounce it “hah-cah-RAHN-dah” (that’s written out with English phonetics). That’s how it’s said in Mexico and Central America.

You can hear this pronunciation loud and clear in the song “What Else Can I Do” from the movie Encanto.

But the tree is native to South America, specifically Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and Brazil. And for those who grew up seeing the equally iconic floral displays in Buenos Aires, there’s a subtle but important difference. In South American Spanish, the word is spelled jacarandá, so it’s pronounced with emphasis on the last syllable: “hah-cah-rahn-DAH.”

But where does the word come from?

Here’s the twist: jacaranda might register as a Spanish word to many, but it isn’t — at least not originally. It comes to English via Portuguese and Old Tupi, a language that used to be a lingua franca for much of colonial Brazil. The word, which refers to a number of different trees, is in the historical record as early as 1614.

The Tupi word was originally recorded as yacaranda or îacaranda — unfortunately, there are no recordings of how this was pronounced back then. Then, it turned into jacarandá in Portuguese. In Portuguese, the letter “j” is pronounced like “zh,” not like the English letter “h.”

So that means in Brazil, it’s pronounced something like “zhah-cah-run-DAH.” You can hear my best attempt at saying it, after a year’s worth of college-level Portuguese classes, in the audio clip above.

However you say jacaranda — “jack-uh-RAN-duh,” “hah-cah-RAHN-dah,” “hah-cah-rahn-DAH,” “zhah-cah-run-DAH” — have at it. Just make sure not to park under one.