Wow

dee-bè-àn where the accent signifies a short vowel.

Some of the options seem best said with a US Southern drawl, while I'm European, and schooled in the 'Posh English' dialect of English. I have mainly succeeded in eradicating it, but traces remain.

I've always pronounced it De'-be-an. I've never heard anyone say Dee'-be-an.
PS: It's short for Deborah and Ian.

I voted for choice 3, but don't really understand what the difference is between that and choice 4, just seems like choice 4 is saying the same thing as choice 3 a little slower for clarity.

If there is a difference, it may be the way Ian is pronounced! In American English, its eee-an. Perhaps British English or someone pronounce it I-an (eye-an), I feel like I've heard that somewhere. In which case, I need to change my vote to #4!

I feel like that's one of the words that's very similar between americans and english; are you comparing to american or what are you comparing to, and how would you pronounce it?

Eean is the correct pronunciation of the name and I have never heard any English person pronounce it differently. It's a Scottish name btw.

resurrected by a useless post (#31) which is actually incorrect, that is not the right pronunciation.

Every post after #2 is useless...

When I married my second wife she demanded to know who is this Debby Ann that I named my computer after.

This whole thread is useless. But you mean you read and rated 35 useless posts? ;p

I pronounce it deb-ee-an. Deb-Ian sounds strange to me.

Did you read #2?

I did, they link the debian wiki where it states

But that's not the way any of the choices are spelled. I still think both 3 & 4 are right, just 4 is talking really slow, and 3 assumes you know how to pronounce Ian.

That's because the author of the poll (who has since been banned) did not know the correct answer, nor how to unambiguously write pronunciations, nor consider that there might be an official answer.

Conflating a thread titled 'How do you pronounce "Debian" correctly?' with a poll titled 'How do you pronounce "Debian" yourself?' also doesn't help - without the poll maybe it would have stopped at post #2. (Though given the proclivity some people appear to have for being wrong, that's not a given.)


For those still unsure, it is clearly documented that Debian comes from Deb + Ian and so the only issue people should be having is in pronouncing those two names.

Deb is a single syllable with a short e sound (as in "bed" or "web") and includes the b sound. (This objectively removes options #1 and #4 in the poll.)

Ian is two syllables, and has variable pronunciations. Ian Murdock made clear he used "ee'-en" - i.e. equivalent to individually saying the letter E (as in "me", or the y in "city") and the letter N (en, as in "ten") - though most people wont notice/care about the variation between "en", "an", or "ən" for that final syllable.

Anyone still unconvinced can simply go find audio/video of Ian Murdock talking about Debian for a canonical answer.