I think it stemmed from me referring to Ibiza by pronouncing it as "Ibitha". But basically we British people do this for tons of Spanish places - e.g. we'd feel terribly basic if we pronounced "Sevilla" as "Seviller" as it is written, we know we got to go for "Se-vee-ah".
This extends to nearly every Spanish place, and seems to be based in several factors that I can perceive, including but almost definitely not limited to:
- the person's actual knowledge of the proper pronunciation
- some kind of sliding scale relationship with how poncy it might be perceived to be to pronounce it properly
- a similar sliding scale in terms of how "common" it might be perceived to be to pronounce it incorrectly
We do it for a lot of Spanish places but not many others. In France I guess you could say we do it with "Nice" as "Neece" but we never say "Paree" for "Paris" unless we're doing some campy "city of love" thing.
It seems to be only British people who try and pronounce the place names like this, and we almost exclusively do it with Spanish place names. No other country represented by my colleagues does it. They all pronounce foreign place names in their own localised accents without consideration of the foreign/proper pronunciation.
I'll add to this thread with more evidence, examples, thoughts, but very much looking forward to what you lot think.