The Acai Berry

A fter recently coming back to the UK and switching on my television, I was hit with a colourful advertisement starring Gok Wan for a well-known yoghurt brand and one of their new products. They have launched several new flavours, including a rather tempting Blueberry and Acai Berry variety.  I have no qualms over the advert itself, merely one with the script, or rather the pronunciation of the aforementioned berry. The said berry is a rather new concept in the Western world, although people from South America, where the berry grows natively, have known about it for quite some time. The Acai berry comes from the Acai palm, but its pronunciation could be baffling for those without any knowledge of Portuguese. Danone were perhaps one of those who were baffled by this pronunciation, or perhaps they did not do their research at all, as has been expressed on Twitter by hundreds of users. Danone and the producers of the advertisement used /a.kai/ (which sounds like "ak-eye") as their chosen pronunciation which is not correct. The Acai Berry even has a dedicated webpage that introduces the correct way to pronounce this word, which is /aˌsaˈi/ (sounds like "ah-sa-ee"), in accordance with the original form from Portuguese. Quite as to why Danone could not find this correct pronunciation during their research for the advertisement is beyond me, but I hope that the fallout on Twitter will be enough for them to correct it, and do better research next time.

Edit: It appears that after a long gap, Danone released a further commercial with the correct pronunciation.