Why Do People Pronounce “Missouri” More Than One Way?

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Heidi, and I am calling from Texas.

Well, hello, Heidi, and welcome. What can we do for you?

I have a question about how you pronounce the show me state.

When I was growing up, we lived all over the country and all over the world. Whenever we moved, people would always ask us where we were from. And since my father’s family was also nomadic, we quite often just referred to my mother’s home state as our home, as the state of Missouri. And people would always ask us why we said that. And we would always just tell them, well, that’s what people from Missouri call it. And then when I moved to Missouri in the 90s, nobody called it that. I was always taught that that’s how you said it. And then I was there and I met people from all over the state and no one ever called it Missouri. And so I just kind of wanted to know who says this. I know that it’s a valid pronunciation because it was always a joke that when politicians flew in, they would automatically all of a sudden call it Missouri, having never heard that before. So I just wanted to know who possibly, where this pronunciation comes from and or why did it change?

We don’t know. There’s actually a really interesting quote by a linguist where he talks about the action on Bill LaBove, William LaBove. He has talked about a lot of vowel changes in language. And he talks about the, we don’t have the answer to the riddle of actuation. We sometimes just don’t know why things change, they just do. But with Missouri and Missouri, we have, fortunately, a really fantastic academic paper published posthumously on behalf of Donald Lance, who was a linguist at the University of Missouri, Columbia, who wrote about the history of this term.

So he tracked down all the original spellings of Missouri that we have from the French explorers and trappers and so forth, the very earliest that we know of. And he tracked down the way the native Indians would have pronounced it, and he tracked down other things like that. And so we have all this data. The short version is, it’s always been kind of in dispute, the pronunciation of this word. But what we really see here, it’s not Missouri alone that is sometimes pronounced with that E becoming an A. There are other words that fall into this. Think of Cincinnati or Cincinnati College. They’re all going, yeah. Why do some people say Cincinnati? Or Miami, Potosi, Hawaii, Corpus Christi, Mississippi, spaghetti, macaroni, ravioli, galeoli, prairie. All of these sometimes sound with an or a schwa at the end.

And there’s something larger happening here than just as happening with Missouri. It’s possible that there’s that last syllable because it’s not stressed. It’s unstressed. It goes from either some value of a short or a long I to becoming a schwa. Because some Missourians don’t say Missouri or Missouri. They say Missouri. More like that in get or met. And that readily lends itself to becoming a schwa.

So there are actually four pronunciations of Missouri that are going around. That said, as of about 40 years ago, the northwest part of the state, now where did you live when you moved to Missouri?

The Kansas City area.

Okay, so that part of the state 40 years ago was a bit more likely, not a lot, but a bit more likely to say Missouri, and the rest of the state was a bit more likely to say Missouri. However, that was 40 years ago, and the trend over the years, according to surveys done by Donald, Lance, and others, of students and other phone surveys, is that the Missouri pronunciation was taking over, and the Missouri pronunciation was disappearing, except, as you say, by politicians who think that they’re going to garner some votes by seeming like an authentic Missourian.

Yes.

Well, Grant, you’re an authentic Missourian.

Yeah, I say Missouri, but that’s because I’m younger. And pretty much my father, who passed away a few years ago, he said Missouri. And so that’s typically my question for you, is when you went to Missouri or Missouri, Heidi, did you make friends with people who are a lot older than you, say 30 years older than you?

No, not really. Most of my friends did say Missouri. Most of the people that I was seeing were my age. So they would be now mostly in their 40s.

Right. So at the time you had moved there, if you’d met people three decades or four decades older than you, you would have met a lot more people who said Missouri, because it’s what they call an age-graded pronunciation. It is a pronunciation that belongs to an older generation that is passing on. And it will eventually just become an artifact of history, probably.

So, Heidi, thank you for the field report.

Yeah, I really appreciate it. Try us again in 30 years. We’ll see if there’s anybody left who says Missouri.

Yeah, it’ll just be me.

Put that on your calendar.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Heidi.

Bye-bye.

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