It’s an incredibly popular Italian dish, but even the most educated food fans may have a hard time recognizing a woman’s puzzling pronunciation.
That woman, named Lani Sanchez, inadvertently found herself at the center of a furious online cultural debate after she shared a recipe video for her new favorite dish, lemon chicken with gnocchi.
But it wasn’t the food itself that sparked a viral response, but the unique way Lani pronounced her key ingredient, gnocchi.
Within minutes of the video being posted to TikTok, it was inundated with comments from viewers brutally mocking Lani for pronouncing gnocchi ‘yonkies,’ with dozens of people pointing out and mocking her mistake.
Perplexed pasta lovers outraged by an American woman’s pronunciation of the dish; whom she called ‘yonkies’
The attached short clip, taken from TikTok, shows a woman cooking her new favorite dish.
The video was posted by food-focused content creator Lani Sánchez.
“This is creamy lemon chicken with gnocchi,” Lani began her video.
“It’s so good and so easy to make,” she enthuses, mixing heavy cream, chicken broth and lemon juice with cooked chicken breast and gnocchi.
While no one had a problem with the dish itself, it sparked a debate about how far it was from the correct pronunciation.
“Yonkeez has me dying,” one person commented on TikTok, while another chimed in: “I was so confused about what yonkeez were until I saw the bag of gnocchi.”
A third expressed their delight at Lani’s unique interpretation of the word, saying, “I will never pronounce gnocchi anything other than yonkeez.” Obsessed.’
“The first time you said yonkees I thought it was like a certain mushroom or something… NO ÑOCCHI,” another joked.
Meanwhile, on X, formerly known as Twitter, the responses were equally scathing, with one person writing: ‘Imagine the word gnocchi. Imagine how you could say gnocchi.
Imagine how you could mispronounce gnocchi. Then listen.’
‘I hate to be that guy, but his pronunciation isn’t that far off. “Gn” in Italian has almost a “ny” sound, the n being very subtle,” one user responded to the video.
‘Imagine a key ny-aww. (Here’s an Italian-American who’s been making gnocchi from scratch since I was a little bambino),’ they added.
While no one had a problem with the dish itself, it sparked a debate about how far it was from the correct pronunciation.
On TikTok, viewers were quick to mock Lani’s pronunciation of the pasta dish, although she seemed happy to take the criticism in stride.
“Except you’re completely removing the ‘n’ from the beginning and adding an unnecessary ‘s’ to the end of a word that’s already plural,” another user responded.
The user continued: ‘There wouldn’t be anything resembling an “aw” sound in the middle either. (Italian-American citizen with dual citizenship who lived and worked in both counties.)
“I was expecting ghee-noh-ki and… she was very close to the correct pronunciation,” wrote another.
“Feels like I took the bait watching this clip,” they added.
“Dude, said Yonkeys, it’s nothing like Nyockey,” argued one gnocchi lover.
“Definitely didn’t say it badly enough to explain all of this,” another agreed.
‘I was going to say that my grandmother always said it like “Yonkies.” They told me that was the southern way to say it,” someone else shared.
Offers refers to another recent viral mispronunciation, from a man who mispronounced tzatziki “tz-i-tz-i.”
“Yes, the tzatziki type is a hundred times worse,” someone declared.
Despite the uproar over her pronunciation of the word, Lani seems to have taken the jokes in stride: She responded to several of the most entertaining comments on her TikTok to poke fun at herself.
“Literally so funny,” he responded to a person who made fun of his pronunciation, before admitting in a later comment that he learned the pronunciation from his mother, who “has been saying it like that his whole life.”