I am the “slight hijacker”. I don’t MEAN to be, but just like the OP said, one thought leads to another and then, well, I just ramble on like some blathering idiot.
I think that’s what I am. I could be the Thread Killer too, 'cause it seems that whenever I post to a thread, it DIES, DIES, DIES!
The lurkiest lurker. I visit the Straight Dope every day and I only have 166 posts since June of 1999 (hey, I just had an anniversary!). That works out to 0.11 posts per day, which I’ll bet is one of the lowest on the board. Of course, I have no way to back that up, but this is my post, so there.
Well, the interesting thing about accent shift in many of the Dakota dialects is that they seem to be a reflection of contact with native speakers of American English. In other words, the native language is being spoken with the same stress pattern as American English. Even more interesting is that in one dialect (Stoney) there are speakers who exhibit variation between the original, native stress pattern and the more widely used American English stress pattern. Whether this is a “transitional” dialect or is more reflective of specific communities with strong language ties is currently unknown.
