Why We Can’t Agree on a Pronunciation of the Word Sauna

Noted: Mirva Johnson is a graduate student at UW-Madison doing research on the Finnish spoken in northern Wisconsin. She says she’s heard a lot of strong feelings about it, but that ultimately there isn’t really a “right” way to say sauna. Basically, one is the Finnish pronunciation and the other is how the word evolved in the English language. Since the U.P. has such a huge population of Finnish ancestry though, in parts of the U.P., the pronunciation never evolved.