The Toughest South Dakota City Name You Might Mispronounce

Sometimes things aren't as easy as they look.

Take these five South Dakota cities. If you weren't from around here, you might be tempted to pronounce them exactly how they are written.

And you'd be wrong.

Here's how they should roll off your tongue:

Pierre ('Peer')
Belle Fourche ('Bell Foo-shh')
Beresford (Beers-ford)
Viborg (Vy-burg)
Huron (Hure-in)

As tricky as that quintet can be, none is the trickiest to pronounce in the Mount Rushmore State.

Recently, Preply, using Ahrefs, Google Trends, and Google Keyword Planner, analyzed search data to uncover the most commonly searched pronunciations of cities and towns across America.

From there, they generated their list of the most difficult-to-pronounce town names in each state.

The top botched pronunciation for South Dakota was a town of 223.

Welcome to Pukwana, in Brule County, in central South Dakota.

The town dates back to 1881 and is named after a Native American word, popularized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 poem 'The Song of Hiawatha', meaning 'peace pipe' or 'curling smoke' from the Ojibwe people.

The correct pronunciation is PUCK-wan-nah.

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