We Minnesotans are used to people making fun of our accent and phrases, but you probably didn’t think we were exceptionally fast talkers.
Turns out we are. The fastest talkers in the whole country, in fact.
The stereotypical fast-talking New Yorkers? They didn’t even make the Top 10.
The conclusion comes from a company called Preply, a language learning app and e-learning platform. While a lot of the different types of rankings that come out have some questionable methodology, determining how fast people in any state talk can be determined pretty accurately.
The data comes from analytics from software that measure the hold times, rate of speech and frequency of speech in more than 4 million phone calls made to American businesses in the past couple of years. The software could then break down how many syllables per second people from each state spoke. https://tinyurl.com/bdfax3vj
Minnesotans, on average, speak 5.34 syllables per second, just nudging out Oregon’s 5.33 syllables.
Turns out most of the Upper Midwest chats at a rapid rate, with Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska in the Top 10.
Less surprising is the slowest-talking states — draw a line around the Deep South states and you have the 10 slowest speakers, with Louisianans speaking the slowest.
While we may talk a blue streak, it turns out we don’t have that much to say. Iowa, Minnesota and then Wisconsin rank as the three least talkative states. New Yorkers talk the most, which likely leads to the perception they’re fast-talkers as well.
It’s not exactly clear why Minnesotans talk faster.
The older German relatives in my family always seemed rather measured in their speech. The ones on my Scandinavian side of the family probably do talk faster.
According to linguist Dave Holsinger, a Minnesotan who wrote on the topic for Racket, a Minnesota website formed by former City Pages editors, our strong German and Scandinavian heritage did lead to the unique way Minnesotans talk and the words and phrases we use, dontcha know.
He said those two groups had a huge influx into Minnesota early on, and the Minnesota lexicon evolved around German and Scandinavian words and sometimes the misunderstanding of their languages.
Minnesotans, for example, often say “borrowed” something to someone when it should be “lend.” Turns out the German word “borgen” can mean “borrow” or “lend out” and led to our modern-day misuse of “borrow.”
We Minnesoooootans also picked up our tendency to string out vowel sounds from German and Scandinavian languages where vowels were often sounded out longer.
“Uff-da” comes from the Norwegian word “Uff.”
It’s not likely we will be able to train ourselves to talk a little slower, talk more, or change our lexicon or Midwest accent.
So why dontcha just embrace it, and if some outsider looks at you odd when you say you’re serving “hotdish” and “pop,” just take satisfaction that we’re a unique people in the North Star state.
Tim Krohn can be contacted at tkrohn@mankatofreepress.com or 507-720-1300.