Why Palin talks like she’s from Lake Wobegon

October 5th, 2008 at 01:10am Chuck Sweeny

Have you been wondering why Sarah Palin of Alaska talks like a woman out of Lake Wobegon, Minn.? I wondered that myself, until this article in the New York Times appeared in Sunday’s edition.  Seems that Alaska’s  Matanuska-Susitna Valley, or “Mat-Su,” where Palin grew up, was settled in the Great Depression by farmers from Minnesota.

My hunch is that because Alaska is so remote, the speech pattern and accent in Mat-Su remains  much the same as the way the Minnesota settlers  talked in the 1930s. Palin’s speech pattern reminds me of Frances McDormand’s exaggerated “Minneswegian” dialect in “Fargo.”

Modern Minnesotans retain traces of the old “Minneswegian,” but they mostly speak standard Midwestern English.

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