Where the women are strong

Mr Verb has posted on the representation of Minnesota Dialect in the Cohen brothers' film Fargo. He does a very nice job describing the features as heard in the film comparing them to the features as they occur in the actual dialect. Go read it.

It reminded me of my post from last September about Buffy's pre-velar raising. Dialectal phonological variation is one of my favorite linguistic areas. To learn a little more about the various AmE dialects take a look also at a couple of sites that I've added to my Resources link list.

Linguists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are doing a lot of research on the "Skonnie" dialect and they've put up a website providing a lot of information.

More generally--the Harvard Dialect Survey has produced some fascinating dot maps from its huge lot of data.

Now go watch Fargo. It's my favourite film by the Cohen brothers. It's disturbing. It's hilarious. It's ridiculous. It's heartwarming.

Or just go listen to some Garrison Keillor. He paints a picture of Minnesota true to all of those qualities without subjecting us to a wood-chipper scene.

[Update:
I see that the Harvard survey site isn't loading up. The link is correct and it was working fine just a couple of days ago. We'll wait a while and see what's up.
]

Aren't all jokes linguistic?

Revisiting double negatives: this time in joke form. Two people told me this joke today. One attributed it to Garrison Keillor; the other attributed it to a Purdue professor. My guess is Keillor told the joke this weekend and it is now making the rounds in English and linguistics departments.

A linguistics professor stood in front of his class and began his lecture on double negatives: "In the English language it is well known that two negatives equal a positive. This is not the case in every language. In some languages two negatives equal a negative. There is however not a single known language in which two positives equal a negative!"

A cynical student in the back row crossed his arms and muttered "Yeah right."