Local dialect: "Shit [that] St. Louisans say"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Fri Mar 22 01:34:44 UTC 2013


Includes the local pronunciations of "Forest Park" and "forty-four."
Apparently, the only major change from back in the day has been the
St.L BE-ism exemplified by the song-title spelled in eye-phonetics as,
"I'm Hurr, I'm Thurr, I'm Urrwhur." Too bad that the sample doesn't
include "sunduh, croppie, tossel, liloc" for "sundae, crappie, tassel,
lilac."

Another St. Louis rapper asserts that "We [St. Louisans] don't talk
country." It seems to me that the StL English here sounds pretty much
GenAm, abstracting away from the local markers, and not at all
Southern.

Of course, that's hardly true of all Missourians. I once had a friend
from Carruthersville, Missouri, the "capital" of Boot Heel, whose
speech was, to my untrained ear, so deeply Southern that it sounded
almost like a parody of my idea of the accent of rural Mississippi,
the speech of, e.g. Ferlin Husky being what I considered to be the
paradigm example of the "out-state" Missouri dialect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXOpmrZAe5ka

--
-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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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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