How to pronounce Sakana

Sakana is most commonly pronounced "sah kah nah" (/sɑˈkɑnɑ/). This is the widely-used reading among engineers, though edge cases exist.

Sakana AI is the Tokyo research lab behind the AI Scientist and evolutionary model merging, co-founded by David Ha and Llion Jones; the name is the Japanese word for fish (魚 / さかな), evoking a school of fish forming a coherent whole from simple rules. Japanese says it flat and even-weighted — sah kah nah, three even morae (heiban, no accented syllable). English speakers commonly anglicize it to suh-KAH-nuh; the reading to avoid is the banana-rhyming suh-KAN-uh, which flattens the middle vowel to the wrong quality.

Alternate readings you might hear:

• "suh kah nuh" /səˈkɑːnə/

Source: Wiktionary — さかな (sakana): Tokyo pitch accent [sàkáná] heiban [0], IPA [sa̠ka̠na̠], "fish"

Pronouncing project and product names correctly avoids the small but persistent friction of being gently corrected during standups, conference Q&As, and team calls. Hearing the word a few times locks in the right reading better than reading IPA ever will. Pronounce is a community-maintained dictionary — every entry tagged with a confidence level and (where possible) a citable source.