How did Spanish "Sevilla" become English "Seville"?

In Spanish, the name of this city is spelled Sevilla and pronounced /seˈβiʎa/, but in English it is spelled Seville and pronounced /sɛˈvɪl/.

Having never heard of Sevilla/Seville until I went to Spain for four months, I only ever heard the Spanish pronunciation. Personally, when I started hearing English speakers say "Seville" in the States and in England I couldn't help but wince and thought it was wrong (everybody I knew in Spain, both English- and Spanish-speaking, pronounced it the Spanish way). To me, it sounded like people pronouncing the the l's in quesadilla. But now people call me pretentious for saying it the Spanish way (yet it's not pretentious to say quesadilla properly...), and I've since come to learn Seville is standard English. How did these pronunciations come to be? Did the English one come about just through mispronunciation of the Spanish?


Seville is just the French spelling. That's where we got the word from. And in general, we pronounce foreign words in English in accordance with English norms and not how they were pronounced in their original language. There's nothing wrong with that.

Where I'm from, there are many Spanish names (i.e "Amarillo Texas", "Los Angeles"), and they are pronounced phonetically as they would be in English and not how they are in Spanish.