Why Palin sounds so weird & how to make sense of her rambling "sentences"
If you're anything like me, you love anything involving:
1) dialectal analysis of spoken American English, and
2) proper sentence diagramming.
(You think I'm kidding? I'm not kidding. I love this stuff. I'm going to teach high school English, after all.)
Sarah Palin, bless her heart, brings both absolutely riveting topics to the fore. Thank you, Governor!
(And thank you, Slate, for publishing both articles!)
AWESOME ENGLISH TEACHER-Y ARTICLE #1
Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary (the only dictionary of which I approve, by the way*), asks, "What Kind of Accent Does Sarah Palin Have, Anyway?"
However, the English teacher side of me can't resist giving my readers a quick lesson in linguistics*:
Sarah Palin doesn't have an accent; she has a dialect.
In the field of linguistics, accents refer to the speech of people speaking a language other than their native tongue. For instance, people who do not speak English as their first language would have an accent.
Think of exaggerated French accents: "Zis ees zee French ack-sont een English, eef you leeve een Fronce." (Translation: This is the French accent in English, if you live in France.)
Dialects, on the other hand, refer to the way a native speaker of a language speaks. In the U.S., we have tons of dialects.
Many dialects are immediately distinctive; you probably recognize that someone's from Boston (or NYC, or Appalachia, or the Deep South) as soon as s/he open her/his mouth.
Sarah Palin has an Alaskan dialect. Now that I've gotten that out of the way, we can move on to what Sheidlower actually has to say:
Overall, because of the mixture of people and the large number of newcomers, Alaskan English is often hard to place, with both Westerners and Midwesterners thinking that it sounds oddly foreign; indeed, some Westerners have said that Palin sounds like a Midwesterner, and Midwesterners that she sounds Western.
The article points out that:
[D]ialect features tend to come from one's peers, not one's parents, and Palin spent her childhood in Alaska's Mat-Su Valley, which is where she got her distinctive manner of speaking.
. . . and gives a brief explanation for some of the most noticeable elements in Palin's dialect:
Alaskan English even has a certain amount of "Canadian raising," the sound change that makes a Canadian about sound something like a boot.
The next town over from Wasilla, Palmer, has a large settlement of Minnesotans - who were moved there by a government relief program in the 1930s - and features of the Minnesotan dialect are thus prominent in the Mat-Su Valley area. Hence the Fargo-like elements in Palin's speech, in particular the sound of her "O" vowel. (Despite its name, Fargo took place mostly in Brainerd, Minn.)
However, even in the area, many people speak a more general Alaskan English, the sort one would find in nearby Anchorage. Palin's frequent dropping of the final G in 'ing' words and her pronunciation of terrorist with two syllables instead of three are characteristic of general Alaskan English (and Western English) rather than the specific Mat-Su Valley speech.
*Yes, I am a dictionary snob. I make no apologies.
*Yes, I just corrected the editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary. I'm such a maverick, right?
AWESOME ENGLISH TEACHER-Y ARTICLE #2
Unapologetic grammar geek Kitty Burns Florey tries to diagram some of Sarah Palin's most meandering, aimless interview responses -- a daunting task not to be undertaken by most mortals. Florey writes:
There are plenty of people out there—not only English teachers but also amateur language buffs like me—who believe that diagramming a sentence provides insight into the mind of its perpetrator. The more the diagram is forced to wander around the page, loop back on itself, and generally stretch its capabilities, the more it reveals that the mind that created the sentence is either a richly educated one—with a Proustian grasp of language that pushes the limits of expression—or such an impoverished one that it can produce only hot air, baloney, and twaddle.
I found myself considering this paradox once again when confronted with the sentences of Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee. No one but a Republican denial specialist could argue with the fact that Sarah Palin's recent TV appearances have scaled the heights of inanity. The sentences she uttered in interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and Katie Couric seem to twitter all over the place like mourning doves frightened at the feeder. Which left me wondering: What can we learn from diagramming them?
For a taste of her enviable sentence-diagramming prowess, check out her diagram of this quote from Palin's interview with Charlie Gibson:
"I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people."
Wow. I'm impressed. The girl's got game, what can I say?
UPDATE: Wow, thanks for all the responses! I didn't think there would be so many fellow grammar geeks like myself. :-) I've got to go to class (my English teaching methods class, incidentally), but I promise to come back and respond to comments after we get out in a couple of hours.