pecan pronunciation

We are a proud Black-owned and LGBT-owned business. We see ourselves as disrupting the nut milk industry. And some have even hinted that as a co-op, we may even be a socialist organization!

By far, the most heated, contentious and controversial issue we have ever run into is the pronunciation of the word “PECAN.”

In Georgia and the South, both pee-CANN and puh-CAHN are common pronunciations. When we talk to supporters at home, we never know how they will pronounce the word. While we’ve decided that as long as folks are drinking Pecan Milk, we don’t quite care how you pronounce the word.

Interestingly, in the Northeast U.S., the pee-CANN pronunciation is common as well. Throughout, the Midwest and Southwest, puh-CAHN will be a more common pronunciation.

It turns out that PAKAN comes from Algonquian Native Americans, a people especially in Canada and the north-east coast. Furthermore, like the concept of “Native Americans” itself, Algonquian is an umbrella word for a number of diverse cultural groups. And those various cultural groups did not have a shared way to pronounce the word either. Some groups like the Algonquian Abenaki use the pronunciation PAGAN, just like the Pagan River in Virginia named by the Algonquian Powhatan people. Ojibwe (Central Algonquian) folks used the call it PAGA, and Algonquian communities described as Miami-Illinois located near Illinois, Indiana and Missouri have the pronunciation PAKAANI. And the variations do not end there.

As European settlers from France and Spain came in contact with indigenous peoples along the Mississippi River in the 1700s, they adopted their words for pecan. The Spanish word for pecan is still PACANA. The French word is PACANE with a silent E. Indigenous and European pronunciations are all much closer to the pronunciation puh-CAHN.

Of course, if you are buying your milk from the Pecan Milk Co-op, you can say it however you like!