José is a predominantly Spanish and Portuguese form of the given name Joseph. While spelled alike, this name is pronounced very differently in each of the two languages: Spanish ; Portuguese (or ).
In French, the name José, pronounced , is an old vernacular form of Joseph, which is also in current usage as a given name. José is also commonly used as part of masculine name composites, such as José Manuel, José Maria or Antonio José, and also in female name composites like Maria José or Marie-José. The feminine written form is Josée as in French.
In Netherlandic Dutch, however, José is a feminine given name and is pronounced ; it may occur as part of name composites like Marie-José or as a feminine first name in its own right; it can also be short for the name Josina and even a Dutch hypocorism of the name Johanna.
In England, Jose is originally a Romano-Celtic surname, and people with this family name can usually be found in, or traced to, the English county of Cornwall, where it was especially frequent during the fourteenth century; this surname is pronounced , as in the English names Joseph or Josephine. According to another interpretation Jose is cognate with Joyce; Joyce is an English and Irish surname derived from the Breton personal name Iodoc, which was introduced to England by the Normans in the form Josse. In medieval England the name was occasionally borne by women but more commonly by men; the variant surname Jose is local to Devon and Cornwall.
The common spelling of this given name in different languages is a case of interlingual homography. Similar cases occur in English given names (Albert, Bertrand, Christine, Daniel, Eric, and Ferdinand) that are not exclusive to the English language and can be found namely in French with a different pronunciation under exactly the same spelling.
Spanish pronunciation
The Spanish pronunciation is . In Castilian Spanish, the initial is similar to the German in the name Bach and Scottish Gaelic and Irish in loch, though Spanish varies by dialect.
Historically, the modern pronunciation of the name José in Spanish is the result of the phonological history of Spanish coronal fricatives since the fifteenth century, when it departed from Old Spanish. Unlike today's pronunciation of this name, in Old Spanish the initial was a voiced postalveolar fricative (as the sound "je" in French), and the middle stood for a voiced apicoalveolar fricative /z̺/ (as in the Castilian pronunciation of the word mismo). The sounds, from a total of seven sibilants once shared by medieval Ibero-Romance languages, were partly preserved in Catalan, Galician, and Occitan, and have survived integrally in Mirandese and in the dialects of northern Portugal.
In those regions of north-western Spain where the Galician and Asturian languages are spoken, the name is spelt Xosé and pronounced .
Portuguese pronunciation
The Portuguese given name José is pronounced as . Examples of this are for instance former President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso and football coach José Mourinho. Historically, the conventional Portuguese spelling of the name was Joseph, just as in English, though variants like Jozeph were not uncommon. Following the 1910 revolution, the Portuguese spelling was modernized. The first Reform of Portuguese orthography of 1911 elided the final mute consonants and from Biblical anthroponyms and toponyms (e.g. Joseph, Nazareth) and replaced them with the diacritic on the final , indicating the stress vowel (e.g. José, Nazaré). In Portuguese, the pronunciation of vowels varies depending on the country, regional dialect or social identity of the speaker: in the case of the ranging from /u/ to /o/; and in the case of , from /e/ to /ɛ/.
The Portuguese phonology developed originally from thirteenth-century Galician-Portuguese, having a number of speakers worldwide that is currently larger than French, Italian and German. In Portuguese the pronunciation of the graphemes and is in fact phonetically the same as in French, where the name José also exists and the pronunciation is similar, aside from obvious vowel variation and language-specific intonation.