Why do some people pronounce the word "Punjabi" as "Poonjabi"?
It's not a dialect issue, but it's strange because
"pun" : "a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word or the fact that there are words that sound alike but have different meanings." is always prouncuned pun, not "poon".
So why the word Punjabi as "Poon"jabi?
Best Answer
They probably assume it is more accurate (a so-called "hyperforeignism"). In English words, the letter "u" is often pronounced as /ʌ/ (the sound of "pun"). But English is fairly unusual in using the letter "u" this way: people expect the letter "u" in a word from another language to represent a sound like [u] or [ʊ] (usually represented in English as "oo": [u] is approximately the vowel in "boot" and [ʊ] is approximately the vowel in "soot").
So if someone has the impression that "Punjabi" is a scientific or standard transliteration of a word from another language, it makes some sense to assume that the "u" represents a vowel that was pronounced in that language as [u] or [ʊ].
Actually, it seems that "Punjabi" is an anglicized spelling of an Urdu word that would be scientifically transliterated as "Panjābī". But there is no easy way for a native English speaker to know this. There are all sorts of words like "Urdu", "Muslim" and "Hindu" where the letter "u" is actually supposed to represent a vowel like [u] or [ʊ] in the original language (the more anglicized spellings "Oordoo", "Moslem/Mooslim/Moslim" and "Hindoo" have now fallen out of favor).
For "Urdu" and "Muslim", English "spelling pronunciations" with /ɜr/ and /ʌ/ respectively exist. So even someone who has heard the word "Punjabi" pronounced aloud with /ʌ/ might assume that it is just a spelling pronunciation like this, and not realize that it is actually the closest sound to the vowel used in the original language.