Changes in St. Louis BE

[Wilson Gray]

On Sep 29, 2004, at 9:09 AM, Gordon, Matthew J. wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Gordon, Matthew J." <GordonMJ at MISSOURI.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Changes in St. Louis BE
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
> My understanding of the vowel pattern in St. Louis BE is that both
> /ir/ =
> and /Er/ are backed so that 'here' and 'hair' sound like 'her'. The =
> former is AFAIK unique to the area while the latter is heard in =
> Philadelphia and elsewhere though not particularly associated with =
> African American speech outside STL.
>
> Wilson, are you saying that 'here' and 'her' were homophonous when you
> =
> were growing up?

Uh, no. I'm saying that they appear to be homophonous *today*, on the
basis of a hip-hop spelling convention, numerous references by
linguistically-naive music critics to a linguistic phenomenon that they
term the "St. Louis drawl," and hearing one black St. Louisan younger
than I am by about two generations pronounce the word "hair." In my
day, before the dialect deteriorated to its present corrupted state, we
black St. Louisans clearly distinguished among
"hair," "her," and "here" as [hae@], [h^], and [hi@], as in any other
well-behaved, r-less, Southern-derived dialect.

Personally, I believe that desegregation, which began to be implemented
by the City of St. Louis in September of 1954, is to be faulted, here.
As is well-known, white St. Louisans speak an r-ful, quasi-Northern
dialect. Once black St. Louisans began to be exposed to the
socially-superior white dialect with its [r]'s on a daily basis ...
Well, I'm sure that there's no need for me to spell it out. I pray that
my bruz and cuz haven't picked up other albisms, such as using the name
of Our Lord Jesus Christ as an exclamation, replacing the time-honored
black obscenity, "motherfucker!" with the white man's "son of a
bitch!", saying "No I never!" instead of "No I didn't!", and using
"youse" and "youses" in place of the divinely-decreed (it's in the
eleventh Commandment) "you" and "y'all." One can only hope.

-Wilson Gray

>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Wilson Gray
> Sent: Tue 9/28/2004 10:39 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject:      Changes in St. Louis BE
> =20
> In reviews of hip-hop/rap records made by black St. Louisans - e.g.
> Nelly and Li'l John, I've several times seen references to a so-called
> "St. Louis drawl." In print, this "drawl" is represented by multiple
> r's, as in the title of the song, "Hot In Herrrre," by Nelly. I've
> listened to this song and others, but, behind the fact that the words
> are chanted/sung, plus all the background noise from the musicians and
> the backup singers, I haven't heard anything that struck me as
> different from what I grew up hearing. And we certainly didn't speak
> with any drawl! Only country folk from "outstate Missouri" drawled.
>
> I've since heard an example of the ordinary speech of contemporary
> black St. Louisans. Well, all that I can say is that didn't nobody talk
> like that fit-ty years ago! A black woman who looked to be about 23 was
> being interviewed on a TV show. When the MC asked what she did for a
> living, she answered, "I style people hair."
>
> I noticed several differences from the BE of my day:
>
> 1) the absence of possessive "s" - "people hair" and not "people's
> hair"
>
> 2) the presence of post-vocalic word-final "r" - "hai[r]" and not
> "hai[@]"
>
> 3) the presence of what I take to be the "St. Louis drawl," one of the
> strangest vowels that I've ever heard in English - "h[weird back
> vowel]r"! The MC didn't understand what she had said and asked her to
> repeat it.
>
> Given the spelling convention, I assume that the "drawl" occurs only
> before the new /r/. And, given that song title obviously punning on the
> sexual reference, "hot in her," and the woman's pronunciation of
> 'hair," I further assume that the sound shift backs vowels before /r/.
>
> Now, if only I knew someone in St. Louis two generations younger than I
> am to act as an informant!
>
> -Wilson Gray
>