My Lion King Forum

So my boyfriend brought up a good point that should be a new short mini discussion. He was looking at the back of my Simba phone case where it says Hukuna Matata, and He asked me "is it really Hukuna Matata, not Akuna Matata,?" and it made me realize, who says it with an A and who says it with an H? cause as I kept thinking about it, I realized I was saying it with an A as in AU-kuna Matata, and trying to saying with the H sound was a little tad harder.

have we noticed this in all films?

It depends on how silent letters work in the language that the phrase is from - in this case Swahili. While I think that Swahili does use silent letters based on very crude research, I don't think that the letter 'h' is silent. I know it's silent in Spanish, and that could possibly be why you might be confused about that, but as far as I am aware, Hakuna Matata is in fact pronounced with an audible 'H'.

Hack-oon-a-ma-tata is how I pronounce it.

Hack-oo-na-ma-ta-ta

Hearable "H"