The whole movie was supposed to be in Minnesota, right? So what was with the Canadian Accents? I went to school for a while in Minnesota. Nobody talked like that. Everyone I knew had Midwestern Accents. Nobody sounded Canadian. I'm honestly surprised no one has brought this up before.
EMOTICONS ARE BACK! YAY!
Basically the same inflection.
I'm from MN (formerly ND) and when traveling out of state people always think I have a Canadian accent. It depends on where in MN/ND one grows up--the closer to the border the more it's the same.
**~Not my circus, not my monkeys...~**
Lol that is not a Canadian accent. That is what Americans THINK is a Canadian accent. It's exactly a Minnesota accent and it probably just sounds odd to you because it's on film and you don't process it the same way as when you lived there. And yeah they're hamming it up a bit to be comical.
shareDon't sweat it. I've met a few Canadians in my lifetime. No, they don't have peculiar accents. They sound pretty much like Americans, typically more like the flat American accent of California. You would have to talk with a Canadian for a long time before detecting that they pronounce a word, here or there, slightly differently than an American. That is the only way you'll know but as I wrote, you have to listen carefully.
shareHi, I am Canadian and no one in the movie had a "Canadian accent". Are you talking about the way the American media portrays us? It is in fact pathetic that some people THINK we sound like that. I am moving to Texas because I am getting married and all of my fiance's friends have said "well you don't sound Canadian" and/or "did you live in the states for a bit?". The reason they think that is because of how the media presents Canadians. If you want anything resembling what the media tells you we sound like, go to the back woods of Newfoundland because I don't know anyone who sounds like that. Canada is the second largest country in the world, it is ignorant to think we all sound alike and say "Canadian accent". Americans don't all sound the same.
As for the movie the accents were exaggerated for comedic value.
[deleted]
As someone who lived in MN for the first 23 years of their life, the only people who sound anything like the movie are typically the older generations and some of the rednecks in the smaller towns, like the ones Mount Rose is based on. Now living out of the state the only time I have ever had anyone comment on my "accent" is the occasional "o" sound that may be a bit off, usually when I say "about." What I thought was more typical of anyone I know are the weird little sayings like "Oh Jesus Christ on a cross" or funny *beep* like that.
shareI lived next door to a married couple from Minnesota. They had toned down their accents when they moved to the South, but they could turn it on at will. When they did, they sounded just like the actors in this movie. I have a lot of Canadian friends and have been to visit them, plus traveled through nearly every province. The accents in this movie don't match usual Canadian patterns. Canadian English has a very unified phonology without much in the way of varying dialects, excluding Newfoundland (which is just adorable). There's interesting stuff like the Canadian Shift (affecting vowels) and this thing called Canadian Raising, but still.
The accents in "Drop Dead Gorgeous" were a humorously exaggerated Minnesota/Midwestern like you would hear in "Fargo" and "Prairie Home Companion" sketches.
It's one of the Minnesota accents. Chaska is now considered the Twin Cities metro. At the time of shooting, there were miles of farms between the metro and Chaska. Mount Rose is just a bastardization of Rosemount which is south-east metro. East of Apple Valley.
If you live in the metro, you tend to have a very Middle-American accent. You still have the caught-cat-cot vowel shift. People tend to speak very fast. You don't notice you're doing it until you talk to someone from another state where they speak slowly.
The high pitched nasal thing is most common to the west but it can be anywhere. My neighbor across the street sounds exactly like all the characters in the movie. She's lived here her whole life.
My accent is straight Middle-American but I have a default accent that I use sometimes that comes from up north of the Range. That one is very different. It's like a Iron Range accent but with extra Finnish and Ojibwe. I only use that up north though. It would sound weird down here.