Alaskan Governor: Sarah Palin's accent

"Oh, my" gets occasional use in the US. It's a very mild interjection.

Even a Brit would know an Alaskan from an Alabaman -- you wouldn't understand the Alabaman. That's a hardcore southern drawl!

As for the passports, remember that the US only has two geographical neighbors, and neither one of them requires us to have a passport to cross the border. Unfortunately, though, our OWN gov't now requires us to have one to get back IN, so you now see plenty of grumbling Americans having to shell out for a passport, or for the slightly cheaper passport card, which isn't good for overseas travel but will allow you to go do your afternoon shopping in Tijuana or Toronto should you live nearby. Travel overseas or further south is a once-in-a-lifetime treat for most people, and they probably only get or renew their passports for the occasion. That said, I know tons of Americans who have travelled abroad at least once, and a few who are repeat offenders, like me. And also people who have hardly ever left their own state. Some people don't have the money or the opportunity to travel much, or just tend to be homebodies.

Anchorageite's comment and information posted is correct, according to what I know and what I've heard from our locals with linguistics backgrounds. Just because Palin's family doesn't have the same accent doesn't mean hers is fake. That's just her accent. Not all people from the Mat-Su Valley have that accent by any means, but due to the history of the area, many more did 20 years ago than now. Population in that area of the State has grown tremendously since, and things change when people from diverse backgrounds move into an area.

Speaking of AK accents, I've always thought it amusing that although I was born and raised in Anchorage, when I lived in Germany they thought my accent had a British lilt to it, and the Brits I knew thought my accent was western Canadian. The Canadians I know don't think it Canadian at all.

Well, I don't know that Germans are any great judges of American versus British. When my mom lived there, and spoke fluent German (but with an accent), she got so tired of people not believing she was American -- because "Americans don't learn other languages", of course -- that she gave up and started telling people she was English. And they bought it!

I think that Europeans generally do take some delight in being just a wee bit smug when comparing themselves with the Americans, and in accusing the "brash and over boastful" Americans of being "isolated, insular, ignorant, parochial, self absorbed and irredeemably revelling in the misplaced assumption that everything American is supremely superior to anything from outside their borders".

Of course that is more than just a wee bit harsh and you only have to read some of the posts by Americans in this Forum to see that they can be more internationally aware than Europeans would realise, but perhaps it could also be said that it's such people who are more likely to log into this site in the first place, who knows.

It's just a question of geography after all - America IS isolated in European terms, you can't possibly deny that, and it's a vast country with only two land borders with other countries, one of which is also English speaking and which bears more resemblance to the USA than it does to Europe (apart from French speaking Quebec, of course) and, way down south, Spanish speaking Mexico, the culture of which does in fact heavily influence neighbouring parts of the US.

The UK doesn't have any land borders with any other country at all - except that between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, but that can hardly be described as a "real" border in the true sense of the word even though technically Ireland is as "foreign" to the UK as is Belgium - English is the language spoken on both sides of the NI/ROI border. The only semblance of "foreigness" is that Ireland has the € while NI has the £ still, but that will inevitably be remedied in the not too distant future.

Here is another European "taking a bash" at our (to quote him: parochial and isolated" American friends) - on this ocassion from a Swede - in a literary article inthe UK national newspaper the "Daily Telegraph" of today Friday 06/10/08. Note the indignant replies from some Americans!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/3120602/Nobel-literature-prize-judge-American-authors-insular-and-ignorant.html

As for Sarah Palin - she comes in for some pretty mixed comments in the UK media this morning - not surprisingly fairly split between the genders, the women here being considerably more disposed towards her than the men are. What many people here are asking - what was all that Palin winking about during her "open chat" with her rival Biden? What was that all about for heaven's sake? Has she got some kind of eye affliction? That is something we would never see on the European political stage! These American elections can be really good entertainment value sometimes!

Have a nice day! (And I REALLY mean that!) ;-)

For what it's worth, Sarah Palin doesn't seem to have Canadian Raising; she also has pre-/l/ laxing of tense vowels.

The Daily Telegraph is the crazy old man who sits on his porch all day and yells at kids to get off his lawn of newspapers.

Porch? I suspect from your text that you are an American - Brits never "sit on their porches" - they are nowhere near designed for that purpose over here.

Domestic porches in the UK are not the same as in America.....here a porch is merely a covered entrance to a doorway - usually the front door, the main entrance to a house.....usually in the form of a recess with an outer door leading to the great outside, usually fitted with glass panes, and windows on either side. You step in through the outer door and about a metre or so inside from that is the main entrance door to the house litself, eading into a hallway in most homes.

Below the inside of the windows of the porch are ledges where people often have an array of pot plants on display along them, and they tend to use porches to store outdoor shoes, umbrellas (umbrellas are quite useful in the UK) and various odds and ends.

In our house the milkman leaves the milk, eggs and fruit juices just inside the porch every morning except Wednesdays and Sundays, as my Mum never locks the outer door, and although the outer door also has a mail flap fitted (letter box if you like to call it that), as does the inner door, the postman usually opens the outer door and drops the mail on the floor of the porch every day except Sunday. My Mum leaves the weekly money for the milkman (a bloke called Lachie - short for Lachlan, a very Scottish name - (proncd: 'LAAHCH-lun - the CH sound must be voiced in the Scottish way - just pretend you are clearing your throat!)

I know that in America a porch is much more like what we call a verandah, covered over and stretching the width of the house which is why the people there can sit out on it in their rocking chairs in the sweltering heat, fanning themselves and chewing tobacco in between eating jambalaya or if they have company then every night they can sit alone and talk and watch a hawk making lazy circles in the sky for they know they belong to the land and the land they belong to is grand.....yipppeee eye yippeee eye yipppeee eye.......!!!!

I'm most certainly American and the land I belong to is so grand <a hrefhttp://www.destination360.com/north-america/us/illinois/images/s/illinois-chicago.jpg>the bridges smell like chocolate</a>. Veranda is generally used in in AmE only in the South. It's where the Colonel sits while sipping his mint julep and all those other things you mentioned.

I shall never forget the day I saw a bunch of American tourists in Montreal trying to buy chewing tobacco and the clerk kindly pointing out to them that he'd never seen anyone buy it and what was there had been sitting there for at least 5 years. That's the closest I've ever been to seeing people chew tobacco in real life.

In my experience (which could very well be more limited than I think in this instance) we don't have quite the same set up here in the US of A. The main door is generally on the outside and little room beyond that would be an entrance hall or a foyer. The house I grew up in did actually have an unlocked (and unlockable) door with a little hall and the main door leading off of it, but only because it was a two family house. Which is to say one floor was one flat and the other was the second flat, it was not a classic semidetached house(BrE)/duplex(AmE).

About the above comment, I only meant to say that every article I've ever seen in the Telegraph seems meant to create OUTRAGE.

Well that didn't post quite like I'd imagined.

Speaking of SNOBS the entry made at 8:56 and others show that the writer admits to being one! Does using a particular dialect or the place of birth or residence indicate superiority or merely the complex?

Yeah, "porch" is a generic term that can cover almost anything from a covered entryway to the whole wrap-around verandah, which is mainly associated with the south. Decks are very popular in the US, especially if your house is built on uneven ground, and you want an outdoor "living room" without a roof. I didn't see many of those in Europe, but perhaps they are found there in sunnier parts than I visited. Courtyards are a feature of Mexican architecture that was borrowed from the Mediterranean style, and those are nice, too -- and often more private and enclosed than a porch. It's too flat to have decks here, but you see them quite a bit on wooded lots.

As for Americans being isolated and insular, well, are we any more so than our neighbors? Most Mexicans and Canadians will never leave North America except maybe for the occasional trip abroad, just like we do, and for the same reasons. Many will never leave the continent at all, and if they do visit another country, it will probably be the neighboring US. But people don't go off on them, or castigate their literature.... The last Mexican book I read (and sorry, it had been translated into English) was The Death of Artemio Cruz, and it pretty much took place in Mexico, with only one aside when one character went off to fight Franco in Spain (and promptly died). The only Canadian author I've read a lot of in Charles de Lint, and his books are usually set in Canada -- mainly Ottawa, if I recall. As they say, you write what you know.....

Sarah Palin's accent is soooo anoying,I can hardly listen to her for 3 minutes! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY SO MANY PEOPLE LIKE HER!she is pretty,yes,but she is ultimately clueless about hardcore politics and I think when things get deep down in the gutter she wont be of any use.Do not expect anything from this fresh face,becouse you will be sadly mistaken. vote Obama 2008!!! REAL CHANGE!!!

Her porn video is out on metacafe.

"Speaking of SNOBS the entry made at 8:56 and others show that the writer admits to being one! Does using a particular dialect or the place of birth or residence indicate superiority or merely the complex?"

Snootiness over language remains a socially acceptable prejudice.

If you don't think so, consider for a moment Senator Obama's chances for success if he spoke in an African-American-hip-hop-cum-gangsta dialect.

I've bin sittin on ma porch in ma dungerees, drinkin moonshine, pluckin ma banjo n a-scratchin ma *** all day. I gotta know, when are them folks in the Government gonna listen to ma ideas about immigrants.