Growing up about 30 miles south of West Plains in Salem, Arkansas, Brooks Blevins believed that Alverdy was his Grandmother Blevins’s first name.
Then, as he got older, Brooks realized Alverdy was just what everyone called her—and that her real name was Alverda. “My grandma’s name ended in ‘a,’ and I didn’t even know that until I was probably a teenager,” Brooks says. As the Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University in Springfield, the folklorist and scholar is now well aware that his grandmother’s name wasn’t the only one mispronounced back then to fit the old-time Ozarks habit—probably a colonial speech fad, he says—of substituting a “y” sound for an “a” at the ends of words.
“Practically any woman’s name that ended in an ‘a’ would end up with a ‘y,’ ” says Brooks, whose lecture “How to Talk Ozark in Seven Simple Steps” covers characteristics like why old-timers might say “a-goin’ ” instead of just “going” or call a “hollow” a “holler.”
He adds, “You grew ‘okry’ in the garden instead of ‘okra.’ My grandpa would even pronounce Idaho as ‘Idyho.’ ”
The Ozarks is far from the only region with pronunciations and expressions that might sound peculiar to outsiders from other parts of Missouri (or is that Missouruh?). Like Brooks says, someone from St. Louis wouldn’t need an interpreter to understand what someone from southern Missouri is saying—or vice versa.
Yet to this day, speech differences can sometimes make conversations go cattywampus and even spark debate in the ShowMe State, where accents and dialects have followed settlers along the roads, rivers, and highways they’ve taken to get to their homesteads.
St. Louis natives Jeff and Randy Vines, owners of STL Style, a Gateway City culture shop, still laugh about a dinner table conversation between their grandmothers—one from St. Louis, the other from Chicago—that had both befuddled. (Hint: They were talking about a flower. Or at least their St. Louis grandma was.)
“My grandma from St. Louis was telling a story about how her husband brought her some orchids back from the war,” Jeff says. “And our grandma from Chicago said, ‘What do you mean? What’s an ‘archid’?”
A Polish immigrant with what Jeff calls a “Jewish-infused” accent, their St. Louis grandma replied, “It’s an archid.” Still, their Chicago grandma was confused. “And the argument went on and on,” he says.
Shifting Vowels
Language scientists called linguists have terms to describe prevailing characteristics of speech and how it evolves within geographical areas.
The same nasal accent that can turn an orchid into an “archid,” “horse” into “harse,” and Interstate 44 into “Farty-Far” is part of what they call the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, Randy says. Self-described “nerds,” he and his twin brother, 44, don’t claim to be linguists, yet they’re fascinated by studies of St. Louis speech just as they’re fascinated by all things St. Louis.
One thing studies show, Randy says, is that this vowel shift can also be heard in other old industrial cities sharing immigration patterns: Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee.
Older than Chicago by almost 70 years, St. Louis, founded in 1764, “already had patterns that were forming here even when Chicago was just in diapers,” Randy says.
University of Missouri-Columbia English professor Matthew Gordon, who specializes in sociolinguistics and dialectology, says it’s not so much whether those immigrants spoke French, Irish, or German. A vowel shift happens when many people end up in one place all at once, as they did when immigrants of several nationalities poured into US cities during industrialization and needed to communicate with each other.
“It’s the coming together of people from different backgrounds that’s important,” Matt says. “It’s this rapid growth where people are thrown together from different backgrounds, and they sort of create a new dialect within that environment.
“That’s why the Northern Cities Vowel Shift is so widespread across the Great Lakes area.”
In St. Louis, that distinctive accent stops beyond the suburbs, Randy says, making Missouri’s second-largest city an “urban speech island,” where talk on the street has more in common with Eastern cities’ gab than it does with Missouri’s largest city on the west side of the state.
Kansas City doesn’t have a lot in common linguistically with St. Louis—and that’s “lot” as in “bought” to people in the Midland Dialect Region, says sociolinguist Christopher Strelluf. The Independence native, now an associate professor at England’s University of Warwick, has researched Kansas City speech.
In fact, Kansas Citians don’t think there’s anything noteworthy about the way they talk, Chris says, adding that most don’t think they have much of an accent.
And even though linguists know “standard English” doesn’t exist (the idea that others don’t speak properly is based on social evaluation, not facts, Chris explains), Kansas Citians tend to believe they speak “in a standard way.”
“When I was interviewing for my work, people would often name broadcasters,” he says. “Of course, Walter Cronkite really lived in Kansas City, but many Kansas Citians would also attribute other broadcasters to having been from the area—or believed that the broadcasters were sort of trained to speak like we do.”
Being so “linguistically secure,” can be a trap—or “trop,” as young Kansas Citians may say these days, according to Chris.
If you don’t watch out, you’ve just—gosp!—lost a vowel sound. Since the early 20th century, as settlers moved west along the Missouri River, the biggest speech change in the Kansas City region has been something called the Low Back Vowel Merger, Chris says. That means most people no longer hear the difference between words like “lot” and “bought,” or “cot” and “caught.” By the 1990s, that “ou” or “au” sound had all but disappeared, he says.
The change of the sound of one vowel leads to other vowel sound changes, Chris explains. He describes it as a linguistic chain shift to the “op” sound in words like “trap.” It is becoming ever more common, showing up in Kansas City area children’s speech as they try to make sense of language.
Matt, Chris’s colleague and collaborator, explains that speakers’ tongues have actually moved to a different place in the mouth when they pronounce words like “caught”: To make “caught” sound like “cot,” the tongue has to be further back in the mouth, Matt says.
Not all vowel mergers happen with some tongue-wagging, though.
“What do you call this?” Chris asks, holding up a pen in a Zoom interview. The reporter says “pen,” yet—Kansas City native that he is—Chris says “pen” like “pin.”
Until his daughter corrects him, that is. Even though seven-year-old Emily has lived in the United Kingdom for five years now, she would agree with Kansas City area women shown by studies to be “increasingly rejecting” this new vowel merger, Chris says.
“So you have kind of an ‘unmerge’ going on.”
From Vowels to Vocabulary
Sometimes, linguistic rejection has its reasons.
Randy Vines explains how St. Louisans of the last century felt justified for refusing to drink the “pop,” and opted to say “soda” instead.
Up in Detroit, the new beverage company Faygo coined “pop” in 1907, to describe the sound a bottle makes when it’s opened. It was a way to market their drinks across the Midwest, Randy says. But less than a decade later, when Vess Soda got its start in St. Louis, residents soon became loyal to their local brew—and, as a result, to “soda.”
The Vines say “soda,” of course, yet when asked whether “soda” or “pop” is their generic word for a carbonated beverage, Missouri Life ambassadors were evenly split between the two, according to Facebook posts to answer that question and others.
Even more than 100 miles south of St. Louis, “soda” is said in Dent County, ambassador Jimmy Anderson reports, while “pop” is the word in northwest Missouri’s Gentry County, (“or Albany at least”), notes ambassador Mackenzie Manring.
Meanwhile, folks in rural Bates County just south of Kansas City remain diplomatic: Ambassador Peggy Buhr reports it’s common to hear a combination of the two: soda pop.
In the Ozarks, rural old-timers used a variation of that term—changing the “a” sound to a “y,” of course. “When I grew up, we went to the store and got a ‘sody-pop’ instead of a soda-pop,” says Brooks, 52.
Later, in Kansas City, Chris grew up saying “Coke” for any soft drink, and until he was about 11, “Missouri-uh,” because that’s the way his father said it.
Does anyone really care whether you say “soda,” “pop,” or a combination of the two? Probably not.
Yet ask people whether the state is called Missour-ee or Missour-uh and you could be jokingly accused of being “born in a barn” if you use the latter. Historical data on how to pronounce the state’s name traces a diagonal line from the northwest corner to the southeast corner of the state, Chris says, with early 20th-century residents in the northwest corner saying “Missouruh” and then-residents in the southeast saying “Missour-ee,” just like the city folk in Kansas City and St. Louis did.
“In the last 30 or 40 years, it’s gone pretty decisively toward Missour-ee,” he adds, “unless you want to index Southern or rural affiliations—or you’re a politician running for office and you need to reach folks who use ‘Missour-uh.’ ”
Here’s the catch: About six years ago, when Chris and Matt began analyzing recordings of interviews with at least 130 Missourians born between 1898 and 1930, they discovered many had a completely different word for the state.
Part of the Missouri Mule History Project, these interviews were recorded between 1981 and 1993 by the late University of Missouri animal husbandry professor and mule expert Clarence Melvin Bradley, who gathered the stories of older Missourians who had worked with mules for years. His recordings are on file with the State Historical Society of Missouri.
“About a third of the speakers, they didn’t say Missour-ee, they didn’t say Missour-uh, they just said Miss-er,” says Matt. “Most of these guys who had that pronunciation were from northern Missouri from the river on up.
“It was quite common 100 years ago to hear that.”
What’s more, he and Chris noticed that many of the speakers didn’t even pronounce the name of their state the same way in the course of an interview, proving it wasn’t a “sensitive issue.”
“Less than half of them weren’t even consistent in how they pronounced the state’s name,” Matt says. “It’s very common for people to sometimes say Missour-uh and sometimes say Missour-ee.
“So we can’t say everybody from this part of the state says Missour-uh and everybody from this part of the state says Missour-ee.”
So, what did you just say?
While it’s true most modern-day Missourians wouldn’t need an interpreter to understand people from other parts of the state, that doesn’t mean what they hear people say a few counties away won’t have them asking, “Huh?”
“I say arl,” Cindy Mertz says.
What? The Old Mines Area Historical Society president in Washington County spells the word over the phone: O-I-L.
Finally, the southwest Missouri native on the other end of the line and not quite two hundred miles away gets it.
Cindy herself knows what it’s like to be confused—partly due to living where the one-of-a-kind dialect of Old Mines French was once spoken, and partly due to her own experiences crossing county lines.
The 63-year-old Potosi native recalls her grandmother calling a “sink” a “zinc.” Then later, in their early years of marriage, when Cindy and her husband, David, visited his family near Cape Girardeau, she couldn’t figure out what his uncles were saying.
“They kept saying ‘bya, bya.’ They were saying ‘bayou,’ ” she explains.
The same thing happens when Potosi visitors mention a creek Cindy and other locals call something like “Forshanna,” she says. If visitors pronounce “Fourche a Renault” in a properly French way, Washington County residents “know what you’re talking about, but that’s not the way you say it,” Cindy says.
Back up in St. Louis, asking for directions and double-checking them on their GPS may not help visitors much if they’re talking to locals still bound and determined to call Interstate 64 by the name it had 35 years ago: Highway 40.
“When people come into our shop and they ask about I-64, we know they’re not from St. Louis because … because that’s 40!” Randy Vines says.
He and his brother will still gladly help them get where they’re going.
And for longtime residents south of the Missouri River in Kansas City, the same route will always be 40 Highway—not Highway 40—according to linguistic research, Chris says.
Hmmm. Would Kansas Citians say 66 Route instead of Route 66? Maybe not. Yet even though the accents and dialects of previous generations of Missourians may be getting harder to hear along roaring interstates and cyber highways, each region still has its unique conversational byways.
That’s no matter whether you call others “you guys,” “yous guys,” “you all,” “y’all”—or “you’uns,” the term Matthew Gordon heard in a 1930s recording of a Mountain Grove native’s speech.
“I still use the term,” Brooks says. “As a matter of fact, I just texted ‘you’uns’ to a friend today. He was somebody who would know what I was talking about and not be bumfuzzled about the whole thing.”
This article was originally published in the January/ February 2023 issue of Missouri Life.
All images from FREEPIK.
