Growing up in Ireland in the 80s/90s, the only Joel we were familiar with was “Billy Joel”. On Irish radio, his surname was universally pronounced as two clearly distinct syllables: Jo-Elle. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that a work colleague from another country pointed out that we were all saying it wrong.
Even the Icelandic singer, Björk sometimes had her name pronounced more correctly by DJs. I guess the diacritic was a big clue that the vowel is not pronounced like the ‘o’ in “fork” (the most common way her name was pronounced) and pretty much everyone knew that the ‘j’ sounds like a ‘y’ in English.
Even the Icelandic singer, Björk sometimes had her name pronounced more correctly by DJs. I guess the diacritic was a big clue that the vowel is not pronounced like the ‘o’ in “fork” (the most common way her name was pronounced) and pretty much everyone knew that the ‘j’ sounds like a ‘y’ in English.