I think you’ll have no problem comprehending this.
Relatively speaking, Minneapolis is Birmingham, while I live somewhere in the Irish Sea off the coast of Dublin. We do have far fewer dialects over that distance.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Up in northern Scandinavia, huge distances are the ‘default’ so I get Minnesota.
And England has retained a surprising number of dialects despite the attempts to eradicate everything that is not “received pronounciation” aka Public School / upper class English.
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-Is Minnesota close to Wounded Knee? I wonder, because I read today is the 135th anniversary of that massacre.
@1 birgerjohansson
Wounded Knee is in the southwestern corner of South Dakota, which is on of the states west of Minnesota, so on the above map it would be in the Atlantic well southwest of Misen Head, Ireland. Whether you want to call that “close” is a judgment call which depends on your sense of scale.
my favorite subreddit is r/geology, where the threads often start with someone asking an interesting question (e.g., “Why can’t we build a tunnel between England and Ireland?”). The first couple of answers are usually detailed and informative, but then everything descends into a series of increasingly insane jokes and puns.
Many accents is right. My parents moved 25 miles south from Stratford upon Avon to Cheltenham a few years ago and the accents of the locals switched completely from West Midlands (Brummie-like) to (northern) West Country.
Where I used to live, near the South coast, you could instantly tell is someone was from Southampton or from a few miles outside the city.
You’d think with the rise of the monoculture the accents would have begun to die out, but they still appear to be thriving in the UK.
If I’ve understood that map mapping correctly, I live somewhere near Mankato. According to Wikipedia it has a remarkably similar population to the town+environs where I am, but it was founded almost exactly a century later.
Can you tell me, please, is it a nice place to live? If so, I might dig a wormhole in time for summer.
@Rich Woods
Mankato is a beautiful river town, with limestone bluffs and multiple colleges. It’s also near Rochester, home of the Mayo Clinic. The ground is currently frozen and covered in snow, as Minnesota is famously known for having northern winters. The worms are deep below the frost line until April.
@5 Rich Woods
Mankato is home to the Betsy-Tacy Society.
Also, there’s a state park with bison.
Someone put together a list of 25 Best & Fun Things to Do in Mankato. Somehow they could only come up with 5 items.
Most magats* will shout, ‘size matters’. We say, ‘pacific, honest quality of character matters more’
*ref.: tRUMP, and his malicious tiny toadstool (mind and mushroom)
UK has 12 times as many people as Minnesota, also, though that is not sufficient to explain the much larger ratio of dialects.
“An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; and American thinks a hundred years is a long time”. It is time that explains the accents.
In terms of both size and population, the UK is comparable to Florida. The US has multiple dialects too, though we have to travel much further than the next village to hear them in person. Television has leveled many dialects to midwestern pronunciation, even in the Derp South.