Heard on The Judges: St. Louis BE

[Wilson Gray]

One day, two black couples from Saint Louis were on one of the shows.
Sure enough, the -Vr sound spelled variously h-ere/h-ear, th-ere,
-air, etc, was uniformly pronounced [^r], "hurr, thurr, and urrwhurr,"
as the song says.

It reminds me of the old "whar, thar" etc. horse-opers pronunciations
- currently used in the supposed(? I have no idea) North-Georgia
hill-country dialect used in the animated cartoon, "Squidbillies"
(available on YouTube, together with "The Boondoocks" for BE, if
anyone cares) except that the equivalent of "hya(i)r" - "hyurr" -
appears not to occur in BE.

Later, two more such couples appeared and they did *not* use what The
Boston Globe called "the St. Louis drawl." Instead, they used pretty
much what I recall as the StL middle-class BE of my youth.

I assume that, as was the case back in the day, StL continues to have
at least two distinct, local dialects, both obviously very r-ful. of
BE.

R-fulness can be hard to track in BE. The same person may say
something like, "_There_ he was, right _wheh_ I tolt[sic] him to be."
OTOH, "yew is / y'all a(re)" seems to be creeping toward universality
in working-class BE speech.

--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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