APRIL 28, 2023 – To catch up on my continuing legal education credits, lately I’ve been attending web-based seminars featuring a bevy of lawyers talking about the finer points of one sub-set or another of . . . the law. I shouldn’t be surprised that many of them speak with a very strong Minnesota accent; after all, most are Minnesota lawyers talking about Minnesota law. Only on occasion do I “hear” Cleveland, Chicago or New York (City) on the part of lawyers with origins in the outside world; people who lost their return tickets after having wandered out here decades ago to the esteemed University of Minnesota School of Law.
Over the decades, humorists have lampooned “Minnesotan” and its Scandinavian origins. Some have gone further and parodied quirky dispositions that seem to go with the accent. For 50 years, all roads in this regard led to Lake Wobegon in central Minnesota or Bob Dylan’s (aka Robert Zimmerman) home town of Hibbing in the heart of the “[iron] Range” northwest of Duluth.
Years ago, I remember, a stand-up comedian at a local club delivered a segment making fun of Southerners and the way they talked. No distinction was made between West Virginia and Mississippi; Alabama and Texas. To the ears of the comedian and the audience, no difference existed across the array of accents between the coal country of West Virginia and the oil fields of west Texas. All were simply, “Southern hick.” To close out the segment, the comedian asked, “Ever wonder what a Southerner considers to be Northern hick?”
The funny thing is that I remember the question but not the answer—most likely because (a) it wasn’t all that funny, or (b) the comedian offered no answer—just the smug implication that we Northerners aren’t hick.
The comedian—and the crowd—were probably unfamiliar with the Maine accent, which was the source of considerable amusement to many of us “outsiders” at the Maine college I attended in the 1970s. The most popular capture was in the form of the LP, “Bert and I,” featuring humorous stories told by Marshall Dodge and Bob Bryan.
A sample:
Local Yocal: “Hey-jah.”
Visitah: “Have ya lived heah ya whole life?”
Local Yocal: “Naughtchyet.”
To my Minnesota ears, the Maine accent—as lampooned by Dodge and Bryan—was definitely “hick,” and since Maine borders Canada, the Maine accent would definitely qualify as “Northern hick.”
At the time, I didn’t know there was even such a thing as a Minnesota accent—and that it might sound “hick” to New Englanders. We Minnesotans, I thought, talked “normal,” which certainly wasn’t the case with the vast majority of students, who hailed from the Northeast. Many of them had difficulty pronouncing their ‘r’s’ (as in “Pahk ya cah in Jeffahson Pahk”). And students from the country of Boston insisted on pronouncing an ‘r’ where there was none, as in “idear.” Where I came from, anyone who’d reached Miss Gorham’s fourth grade knew that “idea” was spelled without an ‘r.’
But after living among Northeasterners for four years, when I returned home to Minnahsohta where ‘a’s’ are extra flat, ‘o’s’ are extra round, “casserole” is pronounced, “HOT-deesh,” a thing certain is “fer sher,” “good-bye” is “byee-naw” and “know” is often turned into a two-syllable word, I began noticing how pronounced our accent can be. As the years progressed, so did my accent awareness. During the recent set of webinars I’ve watched, the Minnesota accent has been on glorious display. There’s nothing wrong with it, but what I’ve noticed is that our accent is better suited for easy going, non-threatening transactional lawyers talking about obscure features of limited liability operating agreements than it is for warrior-class litigators lecturing on how to bowl over a jury. “Minnahsohta ni-eee-ce” doesn’t cut it on cross-examination of a hostile witness and doesn’t fit with an impassioned closing argument.
If we sound “Northern hick,” so be it. We have plenty of company in Maine, whence came many of the lumbermen who established my home town of Anoka and other mill towns. And at least we Minnasohtans kno-ah how to say “r-r-r-r-r-r” and how to spell “idea.”
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
