Why is Zhenya Wang's surname in English "Wang" but sometimes pronounced "Wong"? Australian politician Zhenya Wang, sometimes called Dio Wang, Chinese name 王振亚, has his surname written in English as "Wang", but it's sometimes pronounced in English as "Wong". Another Australian politician used "Wong" in an English sentence, and was accused of getting his name wrong.

From an English speaker's perspective, a name written as "Wang" being pronounced "Wong" seems wrong, even by English's ghoti-y standards. Is there an explanation relating to the Chinese language for this, such as how Chinese speakers describe their name in Chinese with Pinyin?

Ideally, answers to this should be understandable for someone with no prior knowledge about Chinese.
Pronunciation ≠ Spelling!
It's very important to distinguish spellings from pronunciations, so I'm using IPA throughout my answer. I don't know how you pronounce &quot;wang&quot; or &quot;wong&quot;, but it's very likely that the closest pronunciation available in your dialect of English is neither of them.
Chinese pronunciations
I'm basing my IPA off of the Wikipedia help pages on IPA for Mandarin and IPA for Cantonese.

The Mandarin pronunciation of 王 (ignoring tones) is /wɑŋ/. I'm assuming this is the correct pronunciation of the politician's name.
The Cantonese pronunciation of 王 (ignoring tones) is /wɔːŋ/.

Chinese transliterations

The Pinyin (standard transliteration for Mandarin) spelling of 王 is &quot;wang&quot;.
The Jyutping (standard transliteration for Cantonese) spelling of 王 is &quot;wong&quot;.

English pronunciations
There are many dialects of English, and they have wildly divergent pronunciations. I'm basing my IPA choices off of this chart. If you're confused about what the &quot;TRAP vowel&quot; or &quot;CLOTH vowel&quot; mean, see this article on lexical sets. They're by far the easiest way to talk about English vowels.
I give the concrete pronunciations for RP (Received Pronunciation), GA (General American), and AuE (Australian English).

If &quot;wang&quot; is interpreted as having the TRAP vowel (i.e., the same vowel as &quot;bank&quot; or &quot;hang&quot;), then:

RP = /wæŋ/, GA = /wæŋ/, AuE = /wæŋ/
This pronunciation is not the correct pronunciation of the politician's name.


Some people who are more savvy to transliterations and loan words might approach &quot;a&quot;s in unfamiliar foreign words as being the PALM vowel (i.e., same vowel as &quot;father&quot;). Then &quot;wang&quot; becomes:

RP = /wäːŋ/, GA = /wɑŋ/ or /wäŋ/, AuE = /wɑːŋ/
This is the best match to the Mandarin pronunciation available in the given dialects.


Almost certainly, &quot;wong&quot; will be interpreted as the CLOTH vowel (i.e., the same vowel as &quot;long&quot; and &quot;wrong&quot;).

RP = /wɒŋ/ or /wɔŋ/ (free variation?), AuE = /wɔŋ/
About half of GA speakers have /wɔŋ/ and half have /wɑŋ/.
Almost all of these are not correct, as they have a rounded vowel. Only the cot-caught merging speakers of GA have a good match to the Mandarin.