There is more, too.

Moving to something more meaningful… Accents are a serious matter for the new immigrant. Great discussion. I teach English to immigrant adults and am interested in helping my students overcome some of their great pronunciation problems. I have found some resources for them in http://www.GoodAccent.com We must recognize that the current anti-immigrant mood and its consequent discrimination is not a theoretical issue for immigrants.

There are certainly idiolects everywhere but the dialects are quite noticeable: Brooklyn accent (dialect), Southern accent, Texas accent are not coincidental terms. They refer to a set of differences noticeable over a wide area. We don’t heave of an “Oregon accent” or “Northwestern accent” because the variations in these areas are so slight they can be included under the rubric of “idiolect”.

Growing up I never thought that there was an accent in my part of Oregon (at least, no accent that was distinguishable from the rest of the West Coast) though I did think there were some people in small Eastern Oregon towns that had a strong “hick” accent. I wouldn’t describe this “hick” accent as Southern though.

After college I left Oregon and I’ve lived in California and New York. From time to time (especially in New York), people assumed I was from the South or otherwise commented that I had an accent. This surprised me at first but now I accept that I speak with an accent.

I have to say that as time goes by, whenever I go back to Bend or talk to my childhood friends on the phone, it sounds more and more like they have that “hick” accent and I realize what I must sound like to others.

I’m not sure if my Oregon accent is going away with time but my wife (not from Oregon) tells me that when I get together with my old friends I somehow talk differently.

I just wanted to add a little bit of information to the Northern Minnesota comments. I grew up on the border of Minnesota and North Dakota, and I lived in Fargo for several years. I am attending graduate school for sociolinguistics, and I recently bemused studying the change of the Northern Minnesota dialect for a project.

All that being said, I decided to compare the speech of my boyfriend (native Fargoan) to the movie Fargo. While the movie itself had a lot of cleverly inserted nuances to our dialect, I have to say it was inaccurate. The dialect these people spoke is absolutely overdone and stereotyped. Nobody except maybe very rural and elderly farmers or miners from the northwoods would speak that way.

Also, a little side note: the accent is not only influenced by Norwegian, but Swedish, Finnish, and German, and our peculiar word choice/order (“Ya comin with?” or “Fer cute!”) is influenced by these languages as well.

Just my two cents.

Thank you so much for your response. The thread that I mentioned about Mr. Weber’s “accent” has 69 responses. As I said, the role that he plays is supposed to be of a Minnesota native. However, Weber sounds like Christopher Plummer. So, what accent/dialect does Mr. Plummer have? When Plummer does the British roles, he is speaking the Queen’s English?

By the way, I loved the movie “Fargo”. The Cohen Brothers have done some great work. Another favorite of mine is “O Brother Where Art Thou?” I’m from the south and found some (but not all) of the actors speaking a believable southern drawl.

I think you might be confusing your accents. I am not familiar with Jake Weber’s work but he was born in London and should speak either with received pronunciation (Queen’s English) or a cockney accent.

The greatest display of the northern Minnesotan accent is in the Cohen Brother’s masterpiece, “Fargo”. Marge Gunderson and William Macy, two of the creative geniuses on the US screen, create perfect examples of that accent, which bears no notable commonalities with either British dialect. The northern Minnesotan accent is the result of Norwegian influences.

Christopher Plummer? He is from Toronto, Canada. However, is has excellent breadth and has done many British roles admirably.