Midland American English - St. Louis and Vicinity

St. Louis and Vicinity

St. Louis, Missouri is historically one among several (North) Midland cities, but it has developed some unique features of its own distinguishing it from the rest of the Midland.

• A historical feature of the St. Louis dialect is the merger of the phonemes /ɔɹ/ (as in for) and /ɑɹ/ (as in far), while leaving distinct /oɹ/ (as in four). This merger is less frequently found in younger speakers, and leads to the stereotypical exaggeration of the St. Louis accent as "Interstate Farty-Far".
• Some speakers, usually older generations, have /eɪ/ instead of Standard English /ɛ/ before /ʒ/: thus measure is pronounced /ˈmeɪʒ.ɚ/. Wash (as well as Washington) gains a /ɹ/, becoming /wɔɹʃ/ ("warsh").
• The diphthong /ɔɪ/ in standard English becomes more like . For example, words such as "oil" and "joint" are commonly pronounced ayul and jynt, particularly among older speakers within the city and immediate suburbs.
• The phoneme /ð/ is often replaced with /d/, especially among the white working-class urban populace. For instance, Get in that car over there sounds like Get in dat car over dere. This speech characteristic is common in most large, old cities of the East and Midwest, reinforcing St. Louis's cultural evolution alongside other northern industrial urban centers.
• Some younger speakers have picked up features of the first stages of the Northern Cities shift; this vowel shift causes, among other changes, raising and tensing of the vowel /æ/, so that words like cat /kæt/ to become more like . A corridor of communities between Chicago and St. Louis is the only place that features of the Inland North have penetrated noticeably into the Midland, despite the long boundary the two regions share. However, St. Louis remains a Midland city in other respects. For example on rhymes with dawn rather than don, unlike the North. Indeed, the fact that on rhymes with dawn is more distinctive in St. Louis than in the rest of the Midland, since the cot–caught merger is prevented in St. Louis by the presence of the Northern Cities shift.