A sociophonetic study of Cape Girardeau, Missouri English

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This paper explores speech patterns of participants from Cape Girardeau, MO. Cape Girardeau Missouri is located just south of St. Louis along the Mississippi River, and just north of the "bootheel" of Missouri which is in an area that borders the South and the Midland dialect boundaries, an area that has not been studied widely. This study investigates the dialectal variations of ten participants from Cape Girardeau, MO through an informal interview and formal reading tasks. This study compares their different speech tasks as well as their variations across groups of gender, age, and education, focusing on phonological variables with broader regional distributions such as the LOT-THOUGHT merger and the PIN-PEN merger and finds that this community is participating in back vowel fronting, however, evidence suggests the pattern of back vowel fronting is not a new or recent trend in the area. Additionally, although there is evidence of some merging of the PEN-PIN and LOT-THOUGHT merger existing with individual participants, the overall speech community does not merge these vowels and is able to distinguish the different vowels from each other