Opinion: A pronounced difference
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During the controversy over U.S. aid to Nicaragua’s Contras, a commentator (Charles Krauthammer?) noted that while defenders of President Reagan‘s policy pronounced ‘Nicaragua’ in an Anglicized/Americanized fashion, many liberal critics of the policy and NPR reporters gave it a Spanish twist. I’ve noticed a similar difference between the way people pronounce Justice Sonia Sotomayor‘s name, though the linguistic fault line doesn’t seem to be ideological.
But I do detect an ideological aspect to different pronunciations of ‘Iraq.’ Critics of the war say ‘Eer-rack’ or ‘Eer-rock,’ supporters prefer ‘Eye-rack’ (just as my Irish grandmother used to refer to ‘Eye-talians’).
Another mystery: Politicians and others who favor ‘Eye-rack’ also accentuate the first syllable in ‘insurance,’ a difference I used to attribute to regionalism. Surely some dialectician -- not in the Marxist sense -- can build a doctoral dissertation on this phenomenon.