What are ya sayin'?

I watched Fargo last night. Great movie, by the way, but not the point of this post. Language is endlessly fascinating to me, and I noticed the Coen brothers did something great in this movie. They played with the North Dakotan/Minnesotan accent and exaggerated it to the point of hilarity. All the characters spoke with an accent, which was some sort of strange Chicago/Northern City and Canadian hybrid. But it was so over-pronounced, presumably to poke fun of the way people “up north” pronounce their vowels.

It got me thinking about different speaking patterns, and also made me reminisce about the time somebody told my mom she sounded like she belonged in the movie Fargo, along with reminding me of Sarah Palin’s annoying and all-to-common phrase on the campaign trail: “You betcha!”

Apparently those with an accent similar to the one portrayed in Fargo reside along the Great Lakes chain, starting in Buffalo, New York, stretching to Cincinnati, Chicago, and even as southwest as St. Louis. Nobody really knows why our accent has formed the way it has, but some linguists hypothesize that it may have come to be in the 18^th century, gaining widespread usage in the 1950s.

A really interesting interview to listen to if you have time can be found here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5220090

A linguist from University of Pennsylvania describes the Northern vowel shift pattern and demonstrates it verbally. It’s really interesting to hear how different we pronounce our vowels (they call it “up” because instead of pronouncing short vowels like “a” in “cat” with a low tongue, we pronounce it with our tongue “up,” so it sounds almost like a long vowel) compared to places like New York City or Boston.

Give it a listen if you have time.