Pronouncing djinni, genie and janni

The genie family has a number of homophone names. What is the difference in pronunciation between genie and djinni? There isn't one! Genie, djinni, janni and so forth are actually alternative spellings of the same word. The same goes for efreet and ifrit. In this post I will provide a scheme for pronouncing the names of the genie tribes.

I am using the tribes from Pathfinder Bestiary (and Tome of Horrors), since "dao" is closed content. The names abasheen, hawanar, marid, seraph and shaitan clearly do not sound alike, so I need not provide a guide for them. I will treat efreet and ifrit as the same word rather than adopt Pathfinder's stupid usage of "ifrit" to refer to fire genasi elemarns (or, for that matter, "zhyen" for genie familiars when "qareen" already exists).

The following pronunciations are given in the notation of the American Heritage Dictionary due to the variance in English accents.

• Genie(s) = /gĕnē(z)/
• Djinn(i) = /jĭn(ē)/
• Jann(i) = /yän(ē)/

And done! Now you can easily distinguish the three terms in speech.