"Authentic pronunciation"

[Alice Faber]

On 10/3/10 12:16 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> At 10/3/2010 10:31 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>> The stereotypical Minnesota pronunciation is that of the Coen
>> Brothers' "Fargo", as e.g. in the speech of Sheriff Gunderson
>> (Frances McDormand). Hardly among the "least-accented"! (Garrison
>> Keillor also portrays various lexical and phonological idiosyncracies
>> of Minnesota English on his Prairie Home Companion, and at one point
>> a semi-serious spin-off book appeared, Howard Mohr's _How to Speak
>> Minnesotan_. Could be worse, you betcha!
>
> I'll have to rent and re-view the movie. (Keillor I discounted as
> adopting various odd local dialects, as does Rose on "Golden
> Girls".) I seem to have moved the center of unaccented American
> English too far north and west.
>

I think we may be confusing two issues here--the quasi-scientific
identification of which dialect/accent is the least-accented variety of
American English and the folk-belief implicit in statements of "we don't
speak with an accent here". Clearly the former would consideration
wouldn't home in on Fargo, but the latter might well.

--
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Alice Faber                                       faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                            tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                               fax (203) 865-8963

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