Decolonizing the ourang-outang

Language is a powerful form of communication that can reify and reproduce colonial legacies. For many primatologists – scholars who engage with diverse publics, ranging from personal social networks to formal classroom settings to myriad forms of science communication and outreach – it is common to encounter Anglophone speakers who add a final phoneme -ng, or /ŋ/, to the word “orangutan.” We interrogate and explicate the colonial and literary legacies of this phonological enigma. Structured as an essay, our article reports phonological survey results from 569 British- and North American-English speakers as well as a time series analyses sourced from Google Books Ngram Viewer. We found a large disparity between British- and North American-English speakers – 34% and 64% of which add the final /ŋ/, respectively – and telling reversals to the predicted extinction curve of “ourang outang” in Google Books’ British- and American-English corpora. Taken together, these findings put a new and pro..., Figure 1 is based on an anonymous survey developed in Phonic AI (https://phonic.ai) and deployed globally using Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/) over a span of 3 months (March–May 2022). We obtained and evaluated audio recordings in response to a prompt—a photograph of an orangutan together with a written question, How do you pronounce the word orangutan?—from 569 respondents who self-identified as native Anglophones raised in North American or British commonwealth countries; however, 214 recordings (38%) were inscrutable and excluded from the analysis. We combined unambiguous responses from the United States (n = 175) and Canada (n = 52), because the English spoken in these two countries is more similar to each other than either is to British English (Boberg, 2010). The mean self-reported age of British- and North American-English speakers was 36.4 years (range: 19–77; n = 19) and 23.7 years (range: 18–49; n = 70), respectively.
Co-evolutionary dynamics between “ourang-outang” ..., The R Project for statistical computing: https://www.r-project.org/
The open source 'ngramr' package, freely available on CRAN: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ngramr/index.html