Minnesota Four - Text
This white college-educated female was born in 1982 in Liberal, Kansas, moving to Brooklyn Park, a Minneapolis suburb, at the age of nine.
Listen for the subject's characteristic pronunciation of the GOOSE, GOAT, START, LOT, and MOUTH lexical sets. You will observe the characteristic tonality of the Minnesota dialect too.
Recorded by Paul Meier, IDEA Founder and Director, October 23, 2005. Running time 00:04:50.
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
I was born in Liberal, Kansas. And my family and I moved to Minnesota when I was eight years old. Uh, we lived in Brooklyn Park—uh, Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, um, for, for—until I graduated high school in 2000. And then I came back to Kansas and went to Seward County Community College in Liberal. Uh, then I came here to the University of Kansas. And I’ve been here ever since. Well, I’ve been surrounded by accents my whole life, um, because my grandma’s from Alabama, so she has that very distinctive accent as well. And, um—but then when we moved to Minnesota, it was really weird cause people would, uh—in the grocery story, would say things like, “Would you like a beg?” And we were, “What’s a beg?” And then we realized it was a bag. Or we would go out on the lake and on a—on a boat. And, uh, there were just others things. A lot of people up there, um, said, “Would you like to come with?” And that really drove my mom and dad crazy because they’re like, “With whom?” [Laughs] Just—they’re—they do say a lot of yah, for sure. And, um, and I think a lot of that now is just because it’s stereotypical, so it’s just been kind of formed into the mindset there. That’s what people want to hear, so we say it. [Laughs] Well, Brooklyn Park is a suburb of Minneapolis on the north side and, um, there’s a lot of variety of people in that area cause it is—it’s right next to north Minneapolis which is very, um, urban. Um, so there’s just a lot of different people. I had a lot of friends in high school of, uh, different religions and ethnicities and, um, Minneapolis has—well, Minnesota has the second highest Hmong population, second to California. So I had a lot of—of friends who were Hmong which is on the Asian religion, um, from the Cambodian peninsula. So that was pretty cool. A lot of people aren’t sure what Hmong is. And then—well, they called us dark Center, which was just kind of a little jab at us. Uh, we were forty-nine percent minority and—and fifty-one percent white. So—which it wasn’t true but it was just funny that they called us that.