Voices

One of the things I do is listen to people's voices--the words they choose, how they inflect, the rhythm of their speech--and I'm sure lots of other writers do this too. It's interesting to me to study this. Part of it might be my interest in linguistics, but not all of it. After all, listening to people talk is a great primer for characters and the way they speak.

Take our morning call at work for example. Every morning, maintenance runs down all the planes out of service. It's a quick, high-level summary. There's someone who leads the call and then all the stations are asked to check in one by one whether they have an airplane out of service or not.

My favorite facilitator on the call has a warm voice. He greets everyone as if they were all close personal friends, and while maybe some of them air, not all of them can be. He also has a bit of a southern accent, but it's not too heavy. I like listening to him speak.

But he can't do the call every day. Many of those other days are lead by a man I've nicknamed Eeyore. Yes, after the Winnie-the-Pooh character. He's got this monotone, woeful voice. I don't think he's sad, but rather the lack of tonal difference as his speaks. It just sounds so down and I don't find listening to him to be very interesting. In fairness, he has approved some since he was new on the call, but he still has this doldrums voice.

Then there are the other stations. The New York City guys, the Boston guys, the Los Angeles and Seattle and Salt Lake City guys. The foreign stations--Tokyo and London and sometimes Brazil will join the call if there's a plane out there.

I love listening to them all talk. Some of the guys I'd love to meet in person, not to speak with, but just to see if their faces match my imagination. :-) I've created ideas of what they look like in my mind. No doubt none of them look like I image they do and I'd be sorely disappointed. Ah, well. At least I'm learning accents and patterns of speech. If only I were better at conveying what I hear into writing.

Talking Minnesotan Part 2

There are some distinct Minnesota ways of speaking that have nothing to do with an accent. You can check out my previous post for my rant about Fargo and the stereotype that everyone in Minnesota talks like that.

Do you want to go with? That is a full sentence in Minnesota. You can fill in whatever word you like at the end--me, us, him, her, them, etc. In my search of the internet, I saw this attributed to the German speakers who came to the state because it matches their sentence structure.

For me, I don't understand what the big deal is. If you're having a conversation with someone about how you plan to go to the Mega Mall (that's what we call the Mall of America near the airport) this weekend and say, Do you want to go with, that you pretty much can assume the me at the end. Why add an unnecessary word?

Minnesotans also will say, will you borrow me a pencil. Meaning lend, not borrow. That was attributed to Scandinavian speakers and their language. IIRC, it was that lend and borrow were the same word in that language or something like that. Sorry, I viewed many websites about the topic and can't remember exactly. I slip into this one from time to time, but I had a high school teacher who pointed this out to my class and explained why it was wrong, so I've mostly broken myself of this speech habit.

Minnesota Nice plays a role in how we talk. We don't like to offend anyone by making too strong a statement so we say things like that's quite the deal or it could be worse because it always could be worse. This is actually one of the things about living in Atlanta that scrapes against me--how in-your-face people are about things like politics and religion. That's not something that happens much in Minnesota and I'm always taken aback when I hear it here.

The Minnesota hotdish thing was bigger in the past than it is now, IMO. Healthy eating doesn't include hotdishes loaded with cream of mushroom soup and tater tots. I do believe these are still staples, though, at church dinners and funerals. I'm going by conversations I've heard at work from people who actually cook. Me? I'm a disaster in the kitchen and don't have the patience to make a hotdish. :-)

In Minnesota, the weather is a legitimate topic of conversation and can easily last twenty minutes. I've met people from states where they have no real weather to speak of and they are astounded by this. I attribute this to a few things--first, we do have lots of interesting weather in MN and it can change rapidly. Second, it is farm country (outside The Cities) and farmers have an interest in what the weather is doing. Third, it's an easy way to make small talk with someone. No matter who you meet, if they're from MN, you have the weather in common.

I noticed a few typos in here. I corrected the ones I found and please forgive the others. I was passionate as I wrote these last two posts. :-)

Talking Minnesotan

Over the weekend, I did a little searching for how Minnesotans talk. Unfortunately, a lot of what I came up with involved an out-state accent ala Fargo. Um, no. Not in the Twin Cities.

Or I guess I should say you won't hear that accent from people who grew up in the Twin Cities. (FYI, we always refer to them as The Cities.) People who grew up out state might have that accent to some degree, but they tend to lose some of it the longer they live in The Cities. Notice there are only two parts of Minnesota--Out State and the Cities. :-)

One of the blogs I stumbled across was by some woman who'd moved from California to Virginia to Minnesota and her post irritated the crap out of me. First of all, no one I've ever talked to pronounces bag like beg. Ever, chick. Not ever. Second, I've never heard anyone call a snack, lunch. FFS. Lunch is the noon meal, dinner is the evening meal.

Of course, some of the terminology changes in farm country. They call lunch Dinner and Dinner, Supper. But in all my years in MN, not once, not even when I attended college in Morris, MN, have I heard anyone--city or out state--refer to a snack as lunch.

This same blogger bitched about use of the word pop. This is another FFS. Half the country says soda, the other half says pop and some say tonic or Coke. If you want to actually see some statistics on it, there's an entire website devoted to it.

Anyway, my irritation with said blogger is what's inspired this post. I'm so sick of seeing people perpetuating the stereotype that we all sound like the movie Fargo. BTW, according to what I learned in my college linguistics class, the "standard" dialect used by newscasters, movies, radio, etc as the US accent? That's the Northern Dialect. Where does Minnesota fall? Into the Northern Dialect.

But yes, there are some moments where we do sound "Minnesotan." Sometimes that long O just rolls out unexpectedly. Sometimes I do it on purpose. Keep in mind that sometimes I also roll out the Chicago accent on some words unexpectedly.

Next blog post I'll talk about some of the things that are Minnesotan.