Am I an Average Minnesotan?

[Ben Around]

Originally Posted by Slig

everyone I've spoken to from outside of Minnesota has commented on my accent, it definitely exists. We annunciate the "o" sound in words.

Yup, it's the O sound that gives Minnesotans away every time! If you want to hear a good example, listen to Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone": "...Like a rolling stohhn, no direction hohhm.." Or "Rainy Day Women" : "Ev'ry bahdy must git stohhned..." When I first heard these recordings as a teenager living in FL, I thought his pronunciation of these words was very distinctive. Now that I've lived in MN for so long, I don't even notice any more.

(BTW, Bob's mom used to live two blocks from me in St. Paul. She passed away a year or two ago.)

[tvdxer]

From what I understand, we Minnesotans tend to pronounce /o/ "boat" as a monophthong (a pure vowel, like in Spanish, except perhaps longer; the rest of the country pronounces it as a diphthong, two vowels rapidly said together sounding like one sound), and draw out our "u" sounds (as in loot).