Regional Dialect

Tru Wag challenges St. Louisans to accent challenges that even he sometimes fails.

Inspired by the work of Nelly, Chingy and other St. Louis rappers, a group of linguists at New York University began studying the “urr” sound in the mid-2000s. At the time, many linguists still wrongly believed that African-American English sounded the same all across the country — a myth that persisted in the field for decades.

Is it Missour-ee or Missour-uh?Those two pronunciations of the state, according to linguist John Baugh of Washington University in St. Louis, peacefully…