Wait, Is It Nevada, or Nevada?

You say Ne-VAH-duh, I say Ne-VAD-uh. According to Nevadans, the latter is correct and the distinction is important.

With the upcoming Nevada caucuses, presidential candidates and journalists will confront an important issue: how to pronounce the state’s name.

In 2016, Donald Trump told the state’s constituents that they were using the wrong pronunciation at a rally in Reno. George W. Bush and Michelle Obama have also gotten it wrong. The television anchors Brian Williams and George Stephanopoulos have been criticized for botching the pronunciation.

Michael Green, an associate professor of history at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, said using the wrong pronunciation was not a deal breaker for candidates, but using the right one could certainly help win friends and influence people.

“When a candidate says ‘Ne-VAH-duh,’ it sets people’s teeth on edge because it’s reasonable to expect you to know something about your audience,” Dr. Green said.

The Spanish word “nevada” translates to “snow-capped,” a seemingly peculiar name for a state famous for its deserts and arid climate. The state was most likely named after the Sierra Nevada, a snow-capped mountain range, Dr. Green said.

In Nevadans’ preferred pronunciation, the second vowel rhymes with “bad” instead of “awed,” defying the word’s original accent. Dr. Green said this was probably because the area was settled in the 1860s by mostly Northerners and Midwesterners who typically used a hard “a” as opposed to the softer “a” used by Southerners.

Nevadans learn how to pronounce their state’s name when they’re young.

Dr. Green, who grew up in Las Vegas, said he remembered singing the state song, “Home Means Nevada,” in his elementary school years.

Though there is no official pronunciation, Dr. Green said, Nevadans have a sense of pride and ownership over how the state’s name should be said. And it shouldn’t be pronounced as if you were at the doctor’s office with a tongue depressor in your mouth, he added.

Walter Wadiak, an assistant professor of English at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., said: “I honestly think a lot of the variation in pronouncing place names is about identity. It’s a way of marking yourself as an insider and others as outsiders.”

Politicians on the campaign trail are acutely aware of how important it is to say the right thing, but is there a right thing to say?

Dennis Preston, a professor of linguistics at Oklahoma State University, said politicians would have to walk a tightrope when it came to mimicking local customs. They don’t want to come across as fake or pandering, but they also don’t want to seem ignorant, he said.

“The locals want you to do some things because it shows respect for the way they do things,” Dr. Preston said. “On the other hand, they don’t want you to do things which are not your right because they don’t belong to you.”

The debate around state pronunciations is not limited to Nevada. There’s also Oregon, Missouri, Florida, Texas and Colorado — to name a few. Though many residents of these states may emphatically disagree, linguists and language experts insist there is no such thing as a “correct” pronunciation.

“One thing any linguist will tell you is that place names don’t change easily,” Dr. Wadiak said. “This is because people feel strongly about them.”

Pronunciations can vary for many reasons, according to experts.

Many state names have Native American, Spanish or French roots, which can be interpreted in different ways, Dr. Preston said.

Colorado, Texas, Montana and Florida are, like Nevada, derived from Spanish words, but are often said with American English intonations.

The majority of Colorado residents say “Colo-RAD-o,” most Floridians say “FLAW-rih-duh” and Texans tend to end their state’s name with a “z” consonant, said Bert Vaux, a linguistic professor at the University of Cambridge who conducted the Harvard Dialect Survey and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Dialect Survey.

The pronunciation of Missouri, a Native American word translated to mean “town of the large canoes,” was brought to the English language by French explorers and has long been debated among Missourians; is the state’s name pronounced “Mih-ZUR-uh” or “Mih-ZUR-ee”? The answer is influenced by the rural and urban divide, education levels and socioeconomic factors, according to KBIA, a radio station based in Columbia, Mo.

Oregon is an odd case, Dr. Wadiak said. Residents prefer “ORE-uh-gin” — rhyming with “win” — instead of “Ore-uh-GONE.” Dr. Wadiak said that over time, it was very likely that the last vowel sound in Oregon shifted from “GONE” to “GUN” to “GIN” in a process that linguists call “schwaification,” which happens when vowel clarity gets lost.

Some Oregonians even leave out the middle vowel altogether, and the state’s name sounds like the word “organ,” Dr. Wadiak said.

Other states, like Arkansas and Illinois, suffer from what linguists call spelling pronunciations, Dr. Preston said, which is when people intuitively pronounce a word based on its spelling.

That’s how you get “Ar-KAN-sas” and “Ill-ih-NOISE,” Dr. Preston said, though both are considered incorrect according to the states’ residents, who typically say “AR-kan-saw” and “Ill-ih-NOY.”

States that end in an “a” have an alternate “ee” pronunciation that preserves a late-English dialect primarily used by older people, Dr. Preston said. For example, he added, they will pronounce Virginia as “Vir-JIN-ee,” Alabama as “Al-ah-BAM-ee” and Indiana as “In-dee-ANN-ee.”

And sometimes, he continued, words are just hard to pronounce.

“I’ve heard a number of really interesting pronunciations of Massachusetts,” Dr. Preston said. “My favorite is ‘Mass-uh-too-shitts,’ but I also hear ‘Mass-uh-too-sitts’ frequently all over the United States.”

Bill Kretzschmar, a linguistics professor at the University of Georgia who provided American pronunciations for the online Oxford English Dictionary, said that reference books should not be treated as the ultimate authority on pronunciations, which could change over time.

“People like me who have put down pronunciations in dictionaries are just witnesses to what people say,” Dr. Kretzschmar said.

Despite this, some states have tried to officially standardize pronunciations.

In 1881, the Arkansas General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution that declared the state’s correct pronunciation as “AR-kan-saw,” and in 1907, a resolution was introduced in Missouri to establish a “true pronunciation.”

Dr. Preston argued that so-called correct pronunciation was typically whatever language was preferred by the upper-middle classes in different areas of the United States.

“The language police are often people who want you to say the right thing and don’t believe in change and think younger generations, immigrants, ethnic minorities or a lower class don’t have the good sense to speak correctly,” Dr. Preston said.

Language changes were inevitable, he added, and legislating pronunciation would be difficult with the First Amendment in place.

“It’s like changing your clothes,” Dr. Preston said. “It’ll happen every once in a while even if you don’t like it.”

But Dr. Green, a proud Nevadan, doesn’t see that happening in his state. “I think we’re likely to stay with Ne-VAD-uh,” he said.