MINNEAPOLIS — Sarah Palin is no Minnesotan. But she can sure sound like one.
Turns out, there’s a darn good reason for it too.
The GOP vice presidential candidate’s hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, is in the middle of the valley where more than 200 broke families from the Midwest — many of them from Minnesota — relocated during the Great Depression.
Which means Palin grew up listening to the children and grandchildren of those Minnesotans and being fed a steady diet of “yahs” and “ya knows” and even “you betchas.”
“When people settle a new area, there’s not a set accent,” said Joe Salmons, director of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And it takes several generations for a new accent to form. What that means is, she was raised in an environment where there were a lot of people who were new to Alaska, and those Upper Midwestern influences were going to be very strong.”
From the sound of things, Palin listened well. Like a true Midwesterner, her O’s tend to sound “pure” or long, Salmons said. She also tends to turn “you” into “ya.” Palin also emphasizes the ‘s’ at the end of words that typically sound like they end with a Z.
“That’s the stereotype of Upper Midwest speech,” Salmons said.
Salmons said that Palin, whose parents are from Idaho, has a mix of Midwest and Northwest dialects.
“Palin also uses a lot of informal English. Some of it is stereotypical phrasing such as ‘you betcha,’ ” he said.
Some of it comes from dropping the ‘g’ from -ing endings in sentences such as “People are hurtin’,” and “Where are ya goin’?”
