A lot has been said recently about Sarah Palin’s accent. As someone who studies the science of linguistics and is from Alaska (and thus gets a lot of questions about it), I figured I may as well give my two cents.

By far the best article regarding Palin’s accent comes from, of all places, Slate magazine. In it, another Alaskan linguist lays down his claims about Palin’s accent, and is right on. Palin speaks in what Alaskans call the Valley Accent: that dialect spoken in the Mat-Su Valley, where Wasilla is located. The accent of the area is much stronger than the accent of most of the rest of Alaska, being strongly influenced by a Minnesotan accent. Palin’s is very strongly pronounced, and I’m sure her upbringing by Iowans parents from Idaho (Edit: I’m terrible with midwest state names.) had some influence on her accent, and that spending her undergraduate years in the midwest also helped it along. Also, having lived in the same area for so long, excepting her undergraduate years, she’s sure to take on a very strong accent. My mother grew up from age seven until graduating from high school in Wasilla, going to the same high school Palin did, and she does not have nearly as strong an accent (my mother is also a native signer of ASL; the linguistics history of her family is interesting but too long for this article). My mother’s high school friends and siblings born in Wasilla also do not have as strong an accent as Palin, although it is stronger than hers.

So yes, the accent is very real – meaning Andrew Sullivan really is full of shit. Still, it can be very grating to the ears of those bred outside of the Valley, even to many other Alaskans.

Then, there is her dialect. Palin uses a bunch of “cute” turns of phrase: saying “nuclear” as “nucular”, saying “you betcha”, and using also much more than most people. The first and last of these are actually things I do as well. While I’m sure it’s hard for some to believe, the use of “nucular” isn’t wrong: it’s how a lot of people, especially in rural areas such as Alaska, learned to say the word. Both my parents pronounce it as “nucular”, as do many people I grew up near, acquiring my language from. So I say “nucular”, god damn it. I fully understand language as a class marker, and do my best not to (especially when at my Ivy League university), but there is no way to always keep it from slipping out. Also, I tend to use “also” a lot in my speech and writing. I’m sure it is noticeable, as I have been paying attention to it for quite a while in my writing, trying to keep it to a minimum. So neither of these things surprise me. “You betcha” is a phrase that I heard from time to time back home, so it doesn’t strike me as odd, either.

Alaska is a large place with a very small population, and it makes sense that it would have its own dialects and accents. In my high school of 400 students, we developed our own slang, often relating to the marijuana that was smoked by so many of my peers (Palin’s pot smoking being another thing that did not surprise me in the least: everyone in Alaska has smoked pot at some point). “Mao” (pronounced as in the commie bastard) meant to eat when one had the munchies. If something was “dao”, it was either very tasty and about to be mao’ed, or eventually just cool in general. These and other rhyming words would be combined to describe ones state of munchies and what one was about to do about it. I also use the word “spendy” to mean “pricey”, much to many people’s amusement. This is fairly standard back home. Cow Parsnip is called “pushki” due to the influence of Russian (there is a large villiage of Old Believers near my home town).

So what to take from this long-winded rant of a post? There isn’t a point, really, other than to give some data about Palin’s accent, to clear up a lot of the questions. Yes, it is real. Yes, it comes out a lot more when she gets flustered and nervous. Yes, she can be articulate, though she hasn’t often been on this campaign trail. And yes, it sounds funny, even to me whose mother is from the same area.

At some point I’ll have to actually publish my article on my thoughts on Palin. The tone is similar to this: to understand her, you must take her in context of Alaska, which is an insular, weird big little place. In the end, I’m not arguing that any support McCain because of Palin, but like to point out that she’s bringing out the base like no one else could have, and that is the wisdom in her as a choice (as terrible as it was for other reasons). Here’s hoping that people on both sides can begin making decisions based on what she actually thinks and does, though, instead of what accent she has or how “folksy” she is. I already have: I’d rather she stay in Alaska, where she’s actually doing good.

One random little thing: one of my mother’s sisters recently let me know that she’s doing some side work as a Palin look-alike. She grew up in Wasilla and moved to nearby Palmer, and so has kept a bit more of the accent than my mother has. If anyone is looking for a Palin impersonator who costs a bit less than Tina Fey, let me know, I might could work something out.

When the word “jab” first came into politics, it was used so innocently. The second syllable of a two-syllable nonsense phrase, naming the website where funny videos were (and are) shown. Now, though, our language is being corrupted by these whipper-snappers who would have you think that “jab”’s only place in political discourse is at the end of a very nocent phrase:

(the video’s worthless after about 10 seconds)

More seriously, Arnold Zwicky has a post up at Language Log in which he decries the usage of the term “Terrorist Fist Jab“, regardless of context. The post is uncharacteristic of Zwicky and Language Log in general in that it comes off as a politically-correct piece of prescriptivism. The article is a history of recent usage, both in language and in visual media, of the fist jab since the Obamas’ infamous incident. Zwicky ends with an ominous warning against using the term “terrorist fist jab”, even in jest, lest “such uses of the expression [...] reproduce nasty (and false) claims about African-Americans.” Apparently, the linguist has never heard of irony.

When I first saw the Obama fist bump, I didn’t even realize what I was seeing. Not because I didn’t recognize the gesture, but because it was one that even my white ass uses so often myself that I didn’t realize it was out of the ordinary. The next day, a friend mentioned it to me, and when I expressed ignorance to what he was talking about, he sent me a link to a Baltimore Sun article about the gesture. The article was, as I put it to him, “one of the most naive, stupid, and uninformative articles ever.” It was so bad I almost don’t want to link to it, but here it is.

Little did I know that, at nearly the same time, a commentator on Fox News was describing the gesture as a “terrorist fist jab.” Now, no one has ever accused Fox News of being fair and balanced, but such obvious (to me) slander was a bit surprising even from that news outlet. Other outlets continued to make a big deal of the simple gesture, culminating in the New Yorker’s making fun of the whole fiasco in their satirical cover, posing the terrorist Obamas in mid-bump, which all the news outlets decided to make a big deal out of again. Le sigh.

So, this is where Zwicky comes into it. When I realized how big of a deal was being made about the simple and common gesture, I began using the phrase “terrorist fist jab” instead of “bump” when extending my fist towards someone in valediction, in irony. Why? Because it’s a tell. It’s a comment on the ridiculousness of the media, who show themselves to be so out of touch when they write exposés on the “primarily black” phenomenon and can’t make up their mind whether it’s unamerican or “racially hip” to fist bump. The whole thing is just so damn stupid, and those of us who use the phrase ironically (I don’t pretend to have pioneered that usage: it was pretty obvious) are showing that we’re in the know, that we’re hip, that we’ve been using the gesture for years, and that everyone else just doesn’t get it because they’re trying to read too much into something that really isn’t that interesting. In condemning the use of the term, even in irony, Zwicky is showing that he isn’t hip, either.

The Language Log linguist is correct to point out that in the interwebs no one can hear you be sarcastic, and one should thus be careful whilst typing rather than speaking, but he is overly worried that the usage will promote “nasty (and false) claims about African-Americans”. When 14-year-olds in 98% white towns in rural Alaska (that would be me, 8 years ago) learn the fist-bump as an alternative to a high-five, the fist bump is no longer an African-American thing. If it ever was, it hasn’t been for a long time, so anyone worried that the ironic usage obviously doesn’t get it. And really, when someone uses the term ironically, that’s the whole point.