Re: CHAT: Vowel shift - angry-beaverisms

BP Jonsson wrote:
>
> At 00:04 -0500 19.6.1999, Nik Taylor wrote:
> >
> >That's nothing compared to the Minnesotan accent, with its beautiful,
> >yet funny, intonation patterns.  To me, that was the funniest part of
> >Fargo.  I mean, that accent is just so hard to take seriously, I mean,
> >they could say "Ja, my wife was butchered and cut into a million
> >pieces", and it just wouldn't sound like a bad thing.  Okay, slight
> >exaggeration, but it does sound just funny.  :-)
>
> I met one American who thought that intonation was due to Swedish/Norwegian
> substrate influence.  His imitation surely sounded as if that could be
> true, but then his wife was Swedish...  Altho most Swedish and Norwegian
> dialects have a system of distinct word tones, which gives the sentence
> intonation a quality that is peculiar to speakers of other Germanic
> languages, they are not uniform among themselves.  I guess Matt is the only
> one who can judge this theory! :)
>
I definitely think this is the case. I mentioned that many of my
father's relatives have this accent, and that is without exception
within the Norwegian branches of the family.

Laurie