I’m weighing in on the gif pronunciation wars at Mental Floss with the help of corpus linguistics:
Sure, the creator of the gif, Steve Wilhite, prefers a soft g, and sure, gif originated as an acronym for graphics interchange format, but inventors aren’t always good at naming (the zipper was originally called the “clasp locker”), and acronyms aren’t always pronounced like their roots (the “a” in NATO isn’t the same as the “a” in Atlantic). In truth, language is far more democratic.
So Michael Dow, a linguistics professor at Université de Montréal, decided to investigate a different way, and I talked with him about his findings. The idea is, people decide how to pronounce a new word based on its resemblance to words they’re already familiar with. So we can all agree on how to pronounce snapchat because it’s made up of familiar words snap and chat, and we don’t have any problems with blog because it rhymes with frog, log, slog, and so on, but we have no idea how to pronounce doge because there aren’t any other common English words that end in -oge.
The problem with gif isn’t the back half—we already know how to pronounce if. The problem is the front half: Does the i make the g soft or not? It’s clearly not an absolute yes or no—there are English words in both categories: gift has a hard g before i, whereas gin has a soft g before i. What matters is the frequency. So Dow looked at a large corpus of 40,000 unique words with their frequency and pronunciation taken from The English Lexicon Project. Of these words, how many were like gift (hard g) and how many were like gin (soft g)?