Saturday, December 06, 2014

Minnesota English in the news

Nice piece about Minnesota English by Andy Rathbun available here. Looks like he talked to about everybody you could on the subject, including some nice on-the-ground stories from speakers.

People like to compare Minnesota and Wisconsin, it seems like. Minnesota's thriving economically while Wisconsin sinks into oblivion these days and they're vastly better than Wisconsin at college hockey right now, but they don't have much going on this year in the NFL. But they're keep pace dialect-wise.

The Wisconsin Englishes Project folks are said to have something new in the works about vowels in Wisconsin and Minnesota ... stay tuned for that.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I actually was disappointed when I came to Minnesota from the San Francisco Bay area with how similar my accent and everyone else's here were, phonetically. The only major difference was a-raising before g (people here have it, I don't)...

Lexicon differences are always interesting though, like "come with" or "Duck-Duck-Gray Duck".

Mr. Verb said...

You don't think folks here have more back /u:/ or more monophthongal tense vowels, esp. the mid vowels?