Why Do Some Alaska Accents Sound Midwestern?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you?

Doing well. Who’s this?

My name is Mike Kadeen. I’m calling from Seattle.

All right. Well, what’s going on?

Well, it was a couple of weeks ago, I was listening to the show, and you got a caller from Juneau, Alaska. And I had grown up in Alaska, and I was curious about something that Grant had said. She had said that she, the caller, had used Alaskan vowels. And I wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

When I was growing up in Alaska, most everybody came from somewhere else. I was one of the few people who was actually born there other than natives. And everybody just seemed to have their own accents from somewhere else. And I didn’t really think there was a specifically Alaskan accent. And I was wondering, is there one now? And it’s been a few decades since I’ve lived there. And or do people kind of get the same accents their parents have or do they pick it up from the people that they’re around?

All good questions. Great questions. Yeah. Fantastic. Of course, when Sarah Palin popped onto the political scene, this was something that was widely discussed because she’s got such a, I don’t know, distinctive sound to her. It’s just a great linguistic exercise to listen to her speech and try to figure out where she’s from and the characteristic of her language.

Yeah, and she doesn’t much sound like you.

No, not at all. And she doesn’t sound like the Alaskans I grew up with. Of course, it’s a different part of the state.

Right.

But you’re both sort of in the southeast, right?

Well, she grew up in Wasilla, which is north of Anchorage. And I grew up, in fact, same age. I grew up in Sitka, which is southeast.

Okay. And her accent sounds more like an upper Midwest to me than an Alaskan.

Yeah, she’s, well, the upper Midwest shares some features with Canadian English. It was called Canadian Raising. You might have heard us talk about this on another show where the vowels are modified a little bit. I won’t go into the linguistic explanation, but they do some different things with their vowels. They give it that distinctive, you almost want to parody it. I mean, actually, Sarah Palin is pretty easy to parody because her vowels are so distinctive.

But Alaska shares a lot of language features with Canada, particularly Western Canada, even though a lot of people in Alaska are for somewhere else. I’ll often find people who claim, they swear up and down that Alaskans sound like Texans because so many Texans are in Alaska because of oil and the like. But really, you don’t find it when you do the linguistic research. But in short, Alaska has a lot of different language pockets.

Generally, people do things like modify their vowels to be a little more raised, as they’re called it. They drop the G off of ing words. So she does this, particularly when she’s not in a very formal interview, when she’s just giving a regular speech or having a regular conversation. Sarah Palin does it. And a few other features. And to answer another one of your questions, yes, your parents influence how you speak, but your peer groups influence you even more. And if you’re from the outside, your speech is going to change to match the locals.

Right.

Yeah.

Huh.

Well, I hope that’s helped some, Michael. Do you feel like you got an answer?

Oh, yeah. It’s very informative.

Okay, super. Thank you so much for calling. I love your show. I listen to it all the time.

Thanks. That’s nice to hear.

Thanks, Mike. Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

All right. We’ll talk to you later.

Bye.

Canadian raising. We’ll point those links out again. I’ll put them on the website already, but it’s just really interesting that you’ve been able to track the way those vowels change. And for a lot of people in the United States, they only hear Canadian raising in the Great Lakes region or in the upper western Midwest, you know, around Fargo and the like.

Right. And so they think of it as belonging to that area, but it’s actually the whole map of those sounds pushes up into Canada.

Interesting.

Or drops down, I should say, from Canada.

From Canada, yeah. I remember reading, too, that there were a whole lot of Minnesotans that went to Alaska with a work relief program during the Depression. I wonder if that has some influence there.

Yeah, I think it would. Well, we need to write an NEH grant and get some funds to study this. Or else we need to take a lot more calls from Alaska, which we’d love to do. If you’d like to call us and talk about Alaskan English or English from anywhere else, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.