And even today in the Trump era, the debate has taken on a different connotation. Listen while we break down the history of the argument and how that's shaped the polticial and cultural landscape today. Search Query Show Search. Special Projects. Show Search Search Query. Play Live Radio. Next Up:. Available On Air Stations. In a journalist from Kansas City and one from St. Table 2 displays the age-grated distribution of data in the two studies. The general pattern illustrated by these surveys conforms to that suggested by the atlas data in figure a steady decrease in the use of the schwa pronunciation or, conversely, an increase in the use of the high vowel throughout the twentieth century.
The two AAA reports included maps showing the distribution of vowel use by zip code areas. The data from the two surveys have been combined and simplified for the presentation in figure 11, which shows that majority use of the schwa was found in northwestern Missouri including Kansas City. Since the respondents to the Midwest Motorist surveys not only owned cars but also belonged to a travel club, these data do no represent a cross-section of the population.
An atlas type of survey of this region would probably have yielded different statistical results, but with similar regional tendencies. Faries and Lance reported on research from a checklist survey of lexical data in a dissertation study of Missourians born between and Faries Figure 12 shows the areas where dialect items classified by Kurath as having Southern or South Midland distributions outnumber Northern and North Midland items in Missouri.
The surveys used in Faries were conducted from the mids to the mids, when Missouri was a more rural state than it is now. The earliest European settlers in Missouri were French-speaking Canadians, who entered the lead-mining area of eastern Missouri south of present-day St.
Louis by the early s. French-speaking hunters and trappers also plied the tributaries of the Mississippi River throughout the eighteenth century. Realizing the France was about to lose its North American holdings in the French and Indian War, the French king ceded the area west of the Mississippi to Spain in In the s the Spanish governor began allowing Americans to settle west of the Mississippi , and then in the Spanish king ceded the territory back to France.
By , half of the non-Indian population along the Mississippi River in St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve Counties were Americans Schroeder , 12, After the Louisiana Purchase in and the Lewis and Clark expedition in and after American ownership of the region was clarified by the War of , settlers came into Missouri in large numbers, primarily settling close to major rivers.
As the historian William E. As Lance and Faries , point out, most of Missouri had a largely Southern population in its first few decades. Early immigrants did not come from the Old Northwest states because they too were being settled at the same time. The shaded area in the middle of the state in figure 12, known as Little Dixie, was settled in the s by Southerners from Virginia and Kentucky.
The areas in the central part of eastern Missouri along the Mississippi River and along the Missouri River to Little Dixie were settled by French before the Americans arrived and by Germans in the s to s. South Midlanders from Tennessee settled in the Ozarks after mid-century, and second-generation Midwesterners began moving into other parts of the state.
After the Civil War, Union soldiers who had seen the prairies and rich bottomlands of northern and western Missouri began to fill the countryside, casting a layer of North Midland dialect features over the Southern base. The North Midland migration into northwestern Missouri and eastern Kansas is reflected in the findings of the AAA survey shown in figure 12 and in my student data from the counties in northern and western Missouri in table 3. From until , I collected dialect data at the University of Missouri-Columbia by means of student questionnaires, and I have tabulated the data on he pronunciation of Missouri.
For one survey, students administered a lengthy questionnaire to family members, thus providing data representing more than one generation, but most of the data on Missouri are from short questionnaires that students administered to at least ten males and ten females, usually other students.
The form also solicited year of birth and enough personaldata to eliminate non-Missourians from the tabulations. In table 3, the first two pairs of columns are from the longer questionnaire and include only individuals whose families had lived in the same area for three generations, and the other columns are from the short student questionnaires administered in , , and To what may the drastic loss of the incidence of the schwa pronunciation after World War II be attributed?
Young people often show irritation when asked why anyone would use the schwa pronunciation for the final spelled - i. The proper pronunciation is a short i , as in bit, bitter, bivouac , etc. Allen mentions that centralized lower high front vowels occur occasionally in the Upper Midwest in the stressed syllable of sister and the unstressed syllable of waited and horses , but he makes no mention of this vowel in the last syllable of Missouri. Early dictionaries listed only the [ i ] pronunciation.
Now we have added words like bikini , maxi , and mini , and female names with final - i abound— Suzi , Toni , Patii , Judi. The change discussed here is not just a decrease in frequency of pronunciations like Missoura , Cincinnata , and Miama. Our spelling practices, our lexicon, and our perceptions of spelled forms have changed. Walker published his first dictionary in , and it has undergone numerous revisions and expansions since then. A supplement prepared for the edition by Michael B.
Freeman, in a mere 32 pages, lists words ending with i , with somewhat common words being bikini , daiquiri , kabuki , Nazi , origami , ravioli , safari , sari , semi , scampi , sukiyaki , swami , tsunami , and zucchini. These two lists testify not only to the increase in final spelled - i but also to the internationalization of American culture and the American lexicon. Since World War II, not only has a high vowel replaced the schwa, but that high vowel has morphed itself into a high front tense vowel.
Some want to credit the media for promoting one pronunciation of the other, but comments made in the AAA survey and in my classroom surveys were negative more often than supportive of pronunciations by public figures.
Others want to credit teachers for the shift from the folk pronunciation to the spelling pronunciation, but why would the massive shift have taken place in the laid-back instructional atmosphere of the latter twentieth century and not in the nineteenth century, when instruction was much more heavily regulated? Labov as well as other linguists has pointed out that phonological change are systemic, not just systematic, so I am throwing another item into the phonology hopper rather than claiming to have solved a puzzle.
What starts these changes? At least, all four can be explained within the parameters of the development of American English dialects. With reference to the Irish provenance of the schwa pronunciation of vowels in weakly stressed syllables, and thus Missoura , I must point out and underscore that I have merely presented some circumstantial evidence— not proof!
Other details that could be added to this discussion of the pronunciation of Missouri have not attracted as much public or professional attention as the final vowel. I close by proposing three other vowel puzzles and an interesting in the medial consonant: 1 There may be a slight vowel harmony correlation between the quality of the first and final vowels in some regions.
Donald M. Lance passed away on 22 October He had been writing about the pronunciation of Missouri for almost two decades Lance and had made completing this article for American Speech one of the goals of his retirement years. He submitted the manuscript in August and was notified of its acceptance on 7 October.
He went to work right away to prepare the final version and e-mailed the editor about how pleased he was with the helpful comments of the two American Speech referees. Lance had not yet drafted a note of acknowledgments, but he likely would have thanked Michael McCafferty for his generous assistance in sorting out the Algonquian facts.
Special thanks go to his longtime friend Becky Schroeder and to his niece Jo Ann Stevenson for retrieving his computer files and papers and to Matthew Gordon for preparing the article for publication. Allen, Harold B. Fries , ed. Albert H. Marckwardt, Ann Arbor : Univ.
Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest. Minneapolis : Univ. Underwood, eds. Readings in American Dialectology. New York :. Language Variety in the South. Tuscaloosa : Univ. Boberg , Charles. Carver, Craig M. Cohen, Gerald. Costa, David J. Conference , ed. John D. Nichols, Winnipeg : Univ.
Dakin , Robert Ford. Dictionary of American Regional English. Frederic G. D-H and 3 I-O , ed. Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall. Joan Houston Hall.
Cambridge , Mass. Davis, Lawrence M. American Speech Faries , Rachel B. English: Variation and Transition in the American Midwest , ed. Timothy C. Frazer, Fischer, David Hackett. New York : Oxford Univ. Foley, William E. Columbia :. Frazer, Timothy C. Grandgent , Charles H. Hansen, Marcus Lee. Arthur M.
Cambridge : Harvard Univ. I think we're going to Missour-uh a little later today, yeah yeah. We're going to be taking a trip over to Missour-uh!
It's always a painful to see politicians struggle with folksy customs, but before we chalk this up as the latest awkward campaign foible, it bears mentioning: There is no right way to say "Missouri," but Romney made a good choice. People say it both ways, a fact I can verify as a native Missourian. Louis, where Romney took his show of hands, is typically located in "Missour-ee" according to its residents.
By general rule, "Missourah" is heard more frequently as one travels westward, deeper into the state. Matthew Gordon, who notes that St. So, the latter is seen as more 'country' by urban people or as old-fashioned by many young people, etc. Thankfully, former University of Missouri English professor Donald Lance made a hobbyhorse out of the state-name pronunciation-the Missouri Historical Society notes that he was well known for his lectures on the topic before his death in In his paper "The Pronunciation of Missouri: Variation and Change in American English, " Lance noted that the "Missour-uh" pronunciation is not of Southern origin, as it is often believed to be-but that it could be a leveling of the truly rural pronunciation "Missour-eye.
In the early s "Missour-ee" was the chosen pronunciation of so-called "cultured speakers," who led a mass adoption of the "high-vowel" "Missour-ee", according to this chart from Lance's paper:.
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