growing to love what I expected to hate and all the daily craziness surrounding the weather

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Why Sarah Palin sounds Minnesotan

From a Salon.com article:

"Others have wondered whether her accent hails from Idaho, where her parents are from. But dialect features tend to come from one's peers, not one's parents, and Palin spent her childhood in Alaska's Mat-Su Valley, which is where she got her distinctive manner of speaking. The next town over from Wasilla, Palmer, has a large settlement of Minnesotans—who were moved there by a government relief program in the 1930s—and features of the Minnesotan dialect are thus prominent in the Mat-Su Valley area. Hence the Fargo-like elements in Palin's speech, in particular the sound of her "O" vowel."