How to pronounce BSEAH

While it may seem like a mouthful, the acronym for Bringing Southeast Asia Home—BSEAH—is actually a good representation of linguistic features found in many languages spoken in Southeast Asia. First, the word itself might be considered a sesquisyllable, i.e., a word comprising one major syllable preceded by a half, or minor, syllable. In lay terms, there might be a short “uh” (IPA: [ə]) sound between the “b” and the “s” due to the articulatory difficulty of the consonant cluster and the iambic shape of the word. Sesquisyllables have been extensively documented in languages of mainland Southeast Asia (c.f. Matisoff, 1973; Brunelle & Pittayaporn, 2012; Enfield, 2021, among many others). Second, the diphthong “ea”, i.e., the two adjacent vowel sounds composing the syllabic nucleus in the middle of the word, is commonly found in Mon-Khmer languages with large vowel inventories. For example, it is the vowel sound in the Khmer classifier for ‘people’: អ្នក. Finally, the word-final “h” is reminiscent of final laryngeals in an older and pre-tonal form of Vietnamese. The loss of this sound some 1500 years helped create the first tonal split in Vietnamese and is partially responsible for the tones we know today as hỏi and ngã (Haudricourt, 1954; Brunelle, 2018).