In what ways is Southern Missouri southern, and in what ways is it not? (Kansas City: university, moving)

[Alicia Bradley]

Southern Missouri NOT Southern?? Most of NORTHERN Missouri is pretty darn Southern (and by this I mean like the Northern/upland/mountain South, not the deep South).

I lived for more than ten years in Clinton, Missouri (near Kansas City which is, no, not Southern at all, except for a few old Missouri-side blue-collar suburbs), and EVERY NATIVE talked with a distinctly Southern accent (including lots of Southern grammatical constructions). Additionally, many other aspects of the culture were very Southern (corn cob pipes - seriously; Scots-Irish dancing/fiddling/'opry'; making hominy grits on one's porch in a big kettle; sausage biscuits and gravy on McDonald's menus - if you want me to go on [and on and on and on] I will).

What y'all need to understand is that St. Louis, Kansas City, and Columbia are not the rest of the state.

[ajf131]

Originally Posted by Alicia Bradley

Southern Missouri NOT Southern?? Most of NORTHERN Missouri is pretty darn Southern (and by this I mean like the Northern/upland/mountain South, not the deep South).

I lived for more than ten years in Clinton, Missouri (near Kansas City which is, no, not Southern at all, except for a few old Missouri-side blue-collar suburbs), and EVERY NATIVE talked with a distinctly Southern accent (including lots of Southern grammatical constructions). Additionally, many other aspects of the culture were very Southern (corn cob pipes - seriously; Scots-Irish dancing/fiddling/'opry'; making hominy grits on one's porch in a big kettle; sausage biscuits and gravy on McDonald's menus - if you want me to go on [and on and on and on] I will).

What y'all need to understand is that St. Louis, Kansas City, and Columbia are not the rest of the state.

I strongly disagree with that. You can't just pretend these cities aren't a part of Missouri. My dad was raised in Joplin, and the amount of Southern accents and Southern culture you are describing were nowhere near that 40 years ago when he was living there. I've been to Clinton, Missouri and had a chance to chat with a few natives, some of whom were old timers and had lived there their whole lives...they sounded pretty darn Midwestern to my ears. I've been to the whole state, the Northern half of Missouri is solidly Midwestern. As for the Southern half, dialect maps seem to disagree with your statement. I won't deny that I've heard Southern accents in Missouri, but like the person from Ohio several posts above, most of them were only slightly twanged. Around Branson, Poplar Bluff, and Sikeston, the accents take on the nature you are describing. They may have been there at one time, but Clinton could've been an anomally. In any case, it's considered Midwestern, so I'm leaving it at that.

[Alicia Bradley]

ajf131, where are you from originally? Your own background could be coloring your perception of the dialects of rural Missouri.

(Also, which dialect maps do you refer to? I'm a sociolinguist with a special interest in the dialects of Missouri.. so bring 'er on. )

As for my not being able to pretend that St. Louis, Kansas City, and Columbia aren't part of Missouri - what's relevant here are settlement patterns. The majority of the original settlers of Henry Co. (where Clinton is located) were from Kentucky, followed by North Carolina, followed by western (now West) Virginia. Kansas City and St. Louis had VERY different settlement patterns. Columbia is peopled by college students primarily from St. Louis (followed by the K.C. area) and other Northerners.

Why are you so hung up on this issue? Are you uncomfortable with having roots (at least on one side of your family) in a Southern region? (BTW, there was a girl in my high school class who was referred to [by the other students] as "the Mouth of the South." )

[ajf131]

Originally Posted by Orwelleaut

Being from Northeast Ohio, my regional perspective is probably similar to yours, jackhitts My wife and I just had an awesome vacation in Missouri. We spent a day in St. Louis sightseeing, and several days in Branson. Before our trip, we were wondering just how Southern things would feel in Missouri.

Our thoughts?? Missouri is a midwestern state. Just like the other border states (Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, Kentucky), Missouri does have some Southern influence. In the case of Missouri, we found the Southern influence to be negligible, and that influence to only be in the Ozarks.

St. Louis is a midwestern city through and through. The accent is not at all Southern. In fact, the accent is, we thought, less Southern than Cincy. There is greater feeling of friendliness than in the Ohio cities or around Chicago, we thought, but we experienced a similar feel to Springfield, Illinois. It was a genuine and informal friendliness like one finds out West and deeper into the midwest, very different from the Southern manners of a place like Virginia or South Carolina. St. Louis felt more midwestern that Cleveland, but not more Southern.

As far as Branson and the Southwest Missouri area, we could hear a definite shift in the accent from St. Louis in the voices on the radio as we headed west, and some Southern influence. Words like light began to sound like "laht", and we could hear the Southern letter "o" in words like "go" as well. St. Louis has the rounded "o" sounds of the midwest. We heard a lot of rounded "o" sounds around Branson, though, as there are many midwestern tourists.

When we heard accents around Branson that sounded truly Southern and chatted with the people who had the accents, they were usually from Arkansas or Oklahoma. The Southwest Missouri natives sounded only slightly Southern, but still mainly midwestern.

Other than a little bit of Southern speech sounds in Southwest Missouri, there was one trait in Missouri that we thought might be more Southern than midwest, and that we found to make Missouri especially appealing. We found Missourians to be very respectful in comparison to folks in Ohio or even neighboring Illinois. This thing where young males have the bass beat thumping so loud in their car was something we heard less of than in any place we have been in recent years. We heard less of this in St. Louis than we do in rural Ohio, and really noticed the lack of this. I don't know if a respectful mentality toward others of being truly considerate, though, is more akin to places like Kansas or Nebraska, or to the South. Being West of the Mississippi, we wondered if being pleasant and friendly, polite, and respecting others' desire for peace and quiet were more the spirit of the prairie states.

I agree with pretty much everything you said except for West Virginia and Kentucky. West Virginia maybe, maybe not...it definitely has other influences besides just the south, although it leaned more toward the Confederacy in the Civil War. Kentucky definitely feels more Southern than Midwestern. It's amazing how culturally different Louisville is from Cincinnati and Indianapolis. It is closer to both of these cities yet more like Nashville and Memphis. Other than that, Maryland and Delaware I agree are like your description of Missouri. As far as being polite, I always thought Missouri was on par with the prairie states...after all, I think it is a prairie state except that its west off the Mississippi. All of Missouri is prairie, even the Ozarks are basically mountainous tallgrass prairielands. Only difference is that the Ozark prairies are too rocky and shallow and steep for farming row crops.

[OA 5599]

Originally Posted by Alicia Bradley

Southern Missouri NOT Southern?? Most of NORTHERN Missouri is pretty darn Southern (and by this I mean like the Northern/upland/mountain South, not the deep South).

I lived for more than ten years in Clinton, Missouri (near Kansas City which is, no, not Southern at all, except for a few old Missouri-side blue-collar suburbs), and EVERY NATIVE talked with a distinctly Southern accent (including lots of Southern grammatical constructions). Additionally, many other aspects of the culture were very Southern (corn cob pipes - seriously; Scots-Irish dancing/fiddling/'opry'; making hominy grits on one's porch in a big kettle; sausage biscuits and gravy on McDonald's menus - if you want me to go on [and on and on and on] I will).

What y'all need to understand is that St. Louis, Kansas City, and Columbia are not the rest of the state.

Where did you live before Clinton? The accent common in rural Missouri is not a Southern accent. It is hard to describe the differences between the two accents, but I can easily tell them apart. I've also noticed very similar accents in rural Illinois and Kansas...areas that are not the South at all. I personally think that Missouri may seem "Southern" to someone who has never spent much time in the real South, or who is from a distinctly "northern" area (whether the Upper Midwest or Northeast). However, as someone who has spent a fair amount of time in the real South and grew up in deep, deep southern Missouri, I find many differences between the real south and southern Missouri.

[Alicia Bradley]

The dialect of rural Missouri has many phonological, grammatical, and lexical Southern features - as do dialects of rural SOUTHERN Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio (east of there it gets more complicated), and the southeast corner of Kanasas (further west into Kansas I'm not terribly experienced with).

The accent of rural NORTHERN Illinois is a Northern accent, similar to a Wisconsin accent, just as a rural Missouri accent has a lot in common with an (at least northern) Arkansas accent. It has to do with who settled rural Missouri back in the nineteenth century (all the way up to its northern border), and these were primarily people from the upland/mountain South (Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, what's today West Virginia, etc.)

I'd be happy to share with you (by email or another file sharing app of your choice) a paper I wrote in graduate school on a syntactic feature found in Missouri (as well as elsewhere in the mountain South - and I use that term linguistically, obviously, and not geographically) that can be traced back to older forms of Scots-Irish English, but I feel silly going into too much detail about nerdy stuff like that on CD. Just let me know - and I'm dead serious.

[Hillman]

Ok I got in a fight because a Yankee didn't like my accent.Here is a video of us going down our road,just listen to me and see what you think.


YouTube - road 001

hillman

[OA 5599]

Hillman, you sound a lot like the majority of the folks in the Ozarks. Nice video driving through the woods...I missed peaceful drives down gravel roads while living away from the Ozarks.

I think the largest difference between the accent common in rural Missouri and a Southern accent is that the Missouri accent lacks the "twang" that I pick up in Southern accents. The Missouri accents are more of a "drawl". I know nothing about formal linguistics (so I'll pass on the paper), these are just my own personal observations of how people speak in different parts of the world. Even within the South there are large variations in accents...I have a friend from New Orleans and a friend from Kentucky...they both have distinctly different Southern accents.

[Silvermouse]

Originally Posted by Alicia Bradley

Southern Missouri NOT Southern?? Most of NORTHERN Missouri is pretty darn Southern (and by this I mean like the Northern/upland/mountain South, not the deep South).

I lived for more than ten years in Clinton, Missouri (near Kansas City which is, no, not Southern at all, except for a few old Missouri-side blue-collar suburbs), and EVERY NATIVE talked with a distinctly Southern accent (including lots of Southern grammatical constructions). Additionally, many other aspects of the culture were very Southern (corn cob pipes - seriously; Scots-Irish dancing/fiddling/'opry'; making hominy grits on one's porch in a big kettle; sausage biscuits and gravy on McDonald's menus - if you want me to go on [and on and on and on] I will).

What y'all need to understand is that St. Louis, Kansas City, and Columbia are not the rest of the state.

THANK YOU, Alicia, for driving these points across. I finally gave up.



Enjoyed the ride, Hillman! You sound like good folks to me.

[Alicia Bradley]

Hillman, I loved the vid - made me seriously miss setting out for the back country of Osage County (ok, not the true Ozarks - more the foothills - but close enough ) on a spring or fall weekend.

Silvermouse - these guys' resistance to Missouri being culturally Southern is very weird! They should read some Twain (who more than once referred to MO as a Southern state ).