Is it “Gif” or “Jif?”
Why the debate won’t go away any time soon.
In a pretty clever marketing campaign, peanut butter brand Jif’s new limited-edition jars plays on the decades-old debate about whether the file format for short, looping animations — .gif — is pronounced with a soft “g” (as in “giraffe”) or a hard “g” (as in “grow”).
I pronounce it with a hard “g” because, simply, that’s how I was introduced to it. I didn’t know some people pronounced it differently until much later. Someone else, perhaps you, undoubtedly heard it with a soft “g” for the first time, and now pronounces it that way. That’s how language acquisition goes, right?
But at the end of the day, who’s right? How are you supposed to pronounce “GIF?”
Well, it’s complicated.
Let’s dive in!
The case for the soft G
Yes, the creator of the GIF file format, Steve Wilhite, pronounced it with a soft “g.” But there’s more to it than that.
In English, as from the original French, a “g” followed by an “a,” “o,” “u” or a consonant is generally pronounced with a hard “g” whereas when followed by an “e” or “i” it’s generally pronounced with a soft “g.”
Example: A gigantic giraffe gorged gratefully, guzzling gel.
As an aside, Giphy.com, the search popular GIF search engine partnering with Jif on its peanut butter jar campaign, is a lot more clever a name if it’s pronounced “jiffy.” As in, “We help you find the right gif in a jiffy!”
The case for the hard G
Yes, GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format, and “graphics” is said with a hard “g.” But there’s more to it than that.
The rules in the English language, unlike the French, tend to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. It’s a growing language, and (unlike French) it grows naturally rather than formally. That’s why words like “google” and “tweet” are added to the Oxford English Dictionary. If a word becomes used enough, it’s added.
Language usage, after all, just like language itself, is simply socially agreed-upon mouth sounds or visual shapes. English itself is a mutt language, a hodgepodge of German and Latin (via French). When different peoples invaded the British Isles, the language changed.
In this light, I think the creator of the acronym “GIF” has no authority in its pronunciation. He can’t be. Clearly, he’s tried to be and it hasn’t worked. Because language just doesn’t work like that. Language morphs and changes over time. The original pronunciation for “person” was “pair-sun” but so what? We as English speakers have, over time, adopted the word and made it our own? And maybe 100 years from now people will pronounce it “per-sone.” That’s language for ya.
The case for both
Language pronunciation is regional. Some areas pronounce “during” as “doring” or “ensign” as “ensun.” Some people “pahk the cah” or “git er done.” Respecting this, dictionaries often have multiple pronunciation guides for words that have more than one common pronunciation. Same with spelling, such as with “canceling” and “cancelling.”
Which one’s right? Both. Either. Whichever is contextually appropriate. In the case of “cancel(l)ing, the answer is whether you’re in England or the US. But even then, we are such an international society that your readers could be from both places and at that point there isn’t a ‘right’ one anymore.
“Gif” seems to have a similar pronunciation dynamic, though, typical of the internet, it seems less geographically regional and more . . . ideologically? Not sure on how that breaks down.
But I think it’s safe to say that both will last for some time to come.
