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Re: CHAT: Vowel shift - angry-beaverisms

From:L. Gerholz <milo@...>
Date:Thursday, June 24, 1999, 1:40
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