THE PRONUNCIATION OFMISSOURI: VARIATION AND CHANGE IN AMERICAN ENGLISH

Abstract

�� Why do some people say Missour-ee and others say Missour-uh? Which one is “correct”? The spellings in early documents and comments made in print since the late 1600s indicate the existence of considerable variation in the pronunciations of all three vowels and the medial consonant in the word Missouri. An individual may attempt to account for a particular pronunciation on the basis of spelling or on “how the Indians said the word.” In answering the opening questions, this article will take a brief look at “what the Indians said” to early explorers and how nineteenth-century Missouri Indians said the word and then examine evidence from several sources, the most important being the Linguistic Atlas Projects. We know that the Siouan tribe living near the Missouri River did not use the word Missouri before they had borrowed it from the French voyageurs, because a neighboring tribe from a different language family is the source of the name. When Jacques Marquette (1637–75) and Louis Jolliet (1645– 1700) were exploring the Mississippi Valley in 1673, they visited the Peorias (a group within the Illinois branch of the Algonquian Indians) near the mouth of the Des Moines River and asked them “to give us all the information that they had about the sea [Bassin de la Floride, i.e., Gulf of Mexico]