Adding IPA pronunciation for the name "Drupal" into our Brand Guidelines documentation

Created on 22 March 2025, about 1 month ago

Problem/Motivation

We have an official branding documentation, where we mention the logo, colors and usage of the name "Drupal". Why not add a mention to the official pronunciation in the Brand Guidelines, using International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)? This official reference could then be the first step in clearing the confusion around how it gets translated into many non-English languages.

Original motivation:

The way the name "Drupal" is translated into Malayalam (a South-Indian language with 35-37 million speakers), in many places (including the Malayalam Wikipedia page for it),
it is read "dhru-paal", while, it should be something like "droo-pel" or "droo-puhl", to sound like Dries says it in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kUVUCHA9m0.
The wrong translation has stayed around and propagated for long. And this has resulted in all people there saying "dru-paal" and "dhru-paal".
Though I got to make the correction on our localization section (https://localize.drupal.org/translate/languages/ml/translate?sid=9862),
having the pronunciation mentioned in the official branding documentation would help me raise a request to change the translation in quite a few places, including the Malayalam Wikipedia, where it seems to say "dhru-paal".
I could then propagate the same in the Drupal Kerala community, where the Malayalam language is spoken, where I help organize a few events.

Steps to reproduce

Here is the Malayalam Wikipedia page showing the wrong pronunciation:
https://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B4%A6%E0%B5%8D%E0%B4%B0%E0%B5%81%E0%B4...

Related discussions:
https://www.drupal.org/forum/general/general-discussion/2004-11-14/how-t...
https://www.drupal.org/forum/general/general-discussion/2007-03-22/how-d...
https://www.drupal.org/forum/general/general-discussion/2009-03-07/how-d...

Proposed resolution

Following the discussion on Drupal Slack #promotedrupal-brand, as suggested by hestenet, we could have an IPA pronunciation and then a more informal pronunciation guide (or quick audio recording?)

We could use the information about the original pronunciation for the word "Drupal", from here:

  1. From https://www.drupal.org/about/history:

    Pronounced “droo-puhl,” the name derives from the English pronunciation of the Dutch word “druppel,” which means “drop.”

  2. Youtube video - Dries mentioning how "Drupal" is pronounced:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kUVUCHA9m0

and add that to our Branding-related pages.

Remaining tasks

It would be good to have a page/section on the recommended pronunciation, with the latest variations, added under our branding-related pages:
https://drupal.widencollective.com/portals/gfvztttq/BrandPortal,
https://www.drupal.org/about/media-kit ,
and probably,
https://www.drupal.org/about/media-kit/logos and
https://www.drupal.org/about/media-kit/logo-wordmark-guidelines .

User interface changes

API changes

Data model changes

Feature request
Status

Active

Component

Documentation

Created by

🇮🇳India antojose

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