Hey, AClockworkMelon.
Didja hear the one about the guy who couldn’t afford personalized plates, so he went and changed his name to J3L-2404?
He’s smart, but he’s not gettin’ good grades. It’s the disparity that worries your father and me. Do you know what disparity means?
Yah, that’s a good one.
I had dinner in a Perkins’ in Minnesota once. (It was terrible, btw.) The waitress responded to all of my requests with a cheery “you betcha!”. I was so delighted I had to call my mom to let her know.
She’s such a Sooper Lady!
I grew up in a small town between Minneapolis and Duluth. The further north and more rural you are, the thicker the accent. It’s more noticeable in older people.
The only possible response to this is:
I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work, there, Lou.
Y’know, you think that, when you live there. But trust me, when you move away, people right away figure out where you’re from.
I don’t think I have much of a yooper accent (similar to but not exactly the same as the Fargo/Minnesota accent), and indeed, there are many people around me who have much stronger accents than I. But even after living close to 15 years away from here, I had people pick up on my accent and ask me if I was from Canada. Not everyone, but it happened once or twice a year.
Now that I’ve been back here 8 years (to the day, today!), I shudder at what I must sound like.
Did one of the busboys look just like River Pheonix? My friend and I saw Pheonix bussing tables at a Perkins near Minneapolis about 12 years ago, soon after he (apparently) faked his death.
To me, one of the funniest things about the movie was hearing people who (to my admittedly untrained and unsophisticated ear) sounded just like the characters in the movie complain about how ridiculous the accents were. Not saying you fall into that category, since I haven’t heard you speak.
I suspect that, like most things in movies, it is heightened for effect, but I also think that people who say no one talks like that may be desensitized to it in everyday life.
ETA: And of course now I see you made a distinction between Minneapolis, which is as metropolitan as Minnesota gets, and the rest of the state.
Also adding, I think there is an unfortunate tendency for people to associate regional accents and small-town ways with a lack of intelligence and sophistication. Marge is certainly an admirable, competent person.
ETA: I probably just pissed off everyone in St. Paul.
My first wife was from the Iron Range area near Grand Rapids (MN, not MI), and I spent a lot of time in that area on family visits. The accent was very pronounced, but not as bad as in Fargo. I can hear a modified version of it in my kids now; they’ve been living near MSP for the past 15 years and have unconsciously picked it up.
Oh, yah.
I came to Chicago for college and have been here for 7 years now. When I first arrived at school many people were amused by my accent. It faded over time, but I think is still there a little. When I do go back home, though, I am able to hear the MN accent in a way I couldn’t before. If I spend some time there, mine comes back a bit.
I’ve lived about the last 25 years in North Dakota and Minnesota. The accents in Fargo are comic exaggerations, but not complete fabrications. There is a Scandanavian lilt, but it’s usually not as pronounced as in the movie, and people do say “you betcha.”
Sarah Palin, even though she’s from AK, not ND/MN has an accent very close to what’s typical here.
There are some very rural people or very old school folks up here who really do have accents almost as broad as those in the movie.
To draw an analogy to the South, you know how there’s kind of a normal Southern cadence for most people, but then there’s still a few Boomhauers around who really do have accents thick enough to be self-parody? Fargo pretty much takes the Boomhauer equivalents for up here and makes EVERYBODY talk that way.
An actor who does a really good job of a Minnesota accent without being too broad is Kurt Russell playing Herb Brooks in Miracle. He nails it.
Beat me to it. Take off.
I liked the accents in Drop Dead Gorgeous. Those cracked me up.
Oh ya, Frida, sure. She was the oldest living Luthern. Now she’s dead as a doornail. It’s dem damn Shriner’s, won’t take down the God damn sign the lazy sons of bitches. Every year, every damn year I tell dem, “Take down the God damn Frida sign, you lazy sons of bitches!”
Makes me wonder – what part of the country did most white American settlers to Alaska come from?
Most of the settlers in the Mat-Su Valley (where she lives) were farmers from the midwest, offered land in exchange for settling there.
My stepmother is from Arizona (guess where my dad’s from). I watched Raising Arizona with her once and she said the accents were unrealistic.
I too have wondered from where Palin drew her accent. Whenever I hear her voice I think of Marge Gunderson in the movie Fargo. She has the caricatured accent and colloquialisms down, everything except the "Oh, Yah"s.
The ting about that accent is that it’s from the land of looong winters. When your face is half frozen for months at a time, you get that sound. A lot of the idioms and the ‘Minnesota nice’ maybe regional, however.