Replies

I have lived in the central & northern US all my life and there was a difference from central Illinois to Wisconsin that I noticed when I moved north forty years ago. Today, I can only sometimes pinpoint the differences, such as *pin* for pen in people from the more southern of the central plains.

I think American regional accents are gradually trending more toward a common *American* accent. Since I like the southern and the tidewater accents, I think this is sort of sad.

I remember traveling from Illinois to Wisconsin in 1977 and as soon as I crossed the state line the accent changed.

I used to spend a lot of time in east Texas when I was younger and all of the broadcasters on TV and radio had a heavy Southern accent. After an absense of a few years, I returned last year and was suprised to hear almost all the broadcasters using what you call an "American" and I would call Mid-Western accent which is becoming the universal accent of broadcasting.

When we moved to Wisconsin in 1964, I recall commenting on the accent and being told even back then that the Wisconsin-Minnesota pronunciations were the broadcasting standard.

They must have been referring to the university graduates , because back then there was a definite Germanic/Eastern European syntax in Milwaukee ("Down by Gimbels where the streetcar bends the corner round, aina hey")and a Scandinavian lilt to the Minnesotans and rural Wisconsinites who would end their sentences on an upward lilt.Natives of a small town near where I live today still retain a rural Norwegian accent from sometime before WWI. My late FIL, a native of Bergen, Norway, tried to speak to these folks and told us they spoke *Medieval* Norwegian. These people emigrated from Sonja Fjord (phonetic) and the rural Oslo area.

OTOH, we recounted this to some Norwegians we met on a dive trip and they said (this was late 1990s) that even in Norway today, there is an urban dialect and a rural one that goes beyond accent into vocabulary.

Hope we haven't hijacked this thread and apologies to anyone who is irritated. Regional/national accents have always fascinated me. To return somewhat to the thread topic, I wonder if this trend towards a generic American accent/vocabulary is more evidence of our continuing separation from Europe.