I grew up in St. Louis and now live in California. When I order an ice cream sundae, I pronounce sundae “sunduh” and blame it on my St. Louis colloquialism. Can you confirm this, or do I just have bad pronunciation?
Just like Interstate 64/Highway 40 is pronounced “Highway Farty” and just like the town west of St. Louis on Highway 94 is pronounced “Warshington,” some St. Louisans seem to have a dialect all their own. But it seems there is a logical explanation to say “sunduh.” Paul Acker, an associate professor at Saint Louis University’s Department of English, says that since the ice cream sundae was offered on Sundays in the late 1890s as an alternative to the ice cream soda, the pronunciation was changed. These sundaes were sold only on Sunday “perhaps because soda was considered intoxicating and, thus, inappropriate for the Sabbath,” he says. At the time, St. Louis was a western settlement, influenced by dialects from areas in the East called the North Midland (lower Pennsylvania and upper Ohio) and South Midland (Appalachia), says Acker, who is from Connecticut. Many in St. Louis adopted the South Midland dialect, where soda was pronounced “sodee” and Sunday pronounced “sundee.” Acker says that when some speakers corrected their pronunciation of “sodee” to “soduh” in a more proper setting, they also “hypercorrected their pronunciation of ‘sundee’ to ‘sunduh.’”
Tivoli Majors, a linguist and assistant English professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, says the pronouncing of sundae as “sunduh” is only found in St. Louis. “There is speculation that some started to pronounce ‘sundee’ much like they took the word “opera” and pronounced ‘opree.’’’ With influence from the northern dialect, Majors suggests that “sundae” became pronounced as “sunduh.”
St. Louis’ dialect is more “northern” than the rest of the state, Majors says. “We call St. Louis a ‘dialect island’ because it is in a sea of other dialects,” she says, adding that other local oddities such as “for” pronounced as “far” are dying off. “It seems less common, but you do still hear it,” she says. “Over time it will slowly go away.”
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