"Alaskan English even has a certain amount of 'Canadian raising,' the
sound change that makes a Canadian about sound something like a boot."

What Kind of Accent Does Sarah Palin Have?
Wasillan, actually.
By Jesse Sheidlower
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2008, at 1:30 PM ET


Since Sarah Palin was selected as the Republican candidate for vice
president, many people have made comments about her unusual speech,
comparing it to accents heard in the movie Fargo, in the states of
Wisconsin and Idaho, and in Canada. Some have even attributed her
manner of speaking to her supposed stupidity. But Palin actually has
an Alaskan accent, one from the Matnuska and Susitna Valley region,
where Palin's hometown, Wasilla, is located.

Alaska is an unusual dialect area. As with most regions of the
Western United States, its inhabitants have typically arrived from a
variety of places, and comparatively recently. Western dialects are
thus usually less sharply defined than many in the East, where there
are long-established stable settlements that have given distinctive
features to the dialect—as, for example, Scots and Northern Irish did
in the Appalachians, or the Puritans from East Anglia in New England,
or Germans and Scandinavians in the Upper Midwest.

Many Alaska residents came from the Pacific Northwest or Western
Canada, and features of the dialects of these regions are the most
prominent in Alaskan English. Alaskan English even has a certain
amount of "Canadian raising," the sound change that makes a Canadian
about sound something like a boot. There are also a significant
number of immigrants from the Midwest in Alaska, and they have
contributed different elements to Alaskan speech. And in parts of
Alaska, there is influence from Eskimo and Indian languages, though
this is typically found only in people raised in native villages, and
this speech is popularly associated with remote regions.


Alaska also has its own distinctive lexicon culled from a variety of
languages; it includes sourdough, or "long-time native of Alaska,"
and cheechako, or "newcomer" (from Chinook Jargon). Alaska also gave
us the parka (from Russian, ultimately from Nenets, a Samoyedic
language of northern Russia). Overall, because of the mixture of
people and the large number of newcomers, Alaskan English is often
hard to place, with both Westerners and Midwesterners thinking that
it sounds oddly foreign; indeed, some Westerners have said that Palin
sounds like a Midwesterner, and Midwesterners that she sounds Western.

Others have wondered whether her accent hails from Idaho, where her
parents are from. But dialect features tend to come from one's peers,
not one's parents, and Palin spent her childhood in Alaska's Mat-Su
Valley, which is where she got her distinctive manner of speaking.
The next town over from Wasilla, Palmer, has a large settlement of
Minnesotans—who were moved there by a government relief program in
the 1930s—and features of the Minnesotan dialect are thus prominent
in the Mat-Su Valley area. Hence the Fargo-like elements in Palin's
speech, in particular the sound of her "O" vowel. (Despite its name,
Fargo took place mostly in Brainerd, Minn.) However, even in the
area, many people speak a more general Alaskan English, the sort one
would find in nearby Anchorage. Palin's frequent dropping of the
final G in -ing words and her pronunciation of terrorist with two
syllables instead of three are characteristic of general Alaskan
English (and Western English) rather than the specific Mat-Su Valley
speech.

Reaction to Palin's speech has been highly varied. Some people
dislike it, finding it harsh or grating; others regard it as charming
or authentic. These are common responses to a distinctive accent.
Depending on the context, such an accent can make a person seem
stupid or uneducated or, conversely, honest and folksily trustworthy—
often at the same time. Some people exploit this for effect,
emphasizing and de-emphasizing dialect features to prompt a
particular reaction. Linguists call this code-switching. In this
Palin interview with Katie Couric, you can hear her enunciating her -
ings and her yous more clearly in responses where she appeared to
have a ready answer, and returning to her more natural -in' and ya
when she seemed stumped, which suggests that Palin may have been
deliberately attempting to minimize her dialect features for that
audience.

Thanks to Joan Hall of the Dictionary of American Regional English
and Alaska native James Crippen of the University of
Hawaii.

http://www.slate.com/id/2201318/