I just watched the 1996 movie Fargo for the first time. It was extremely brilliant.
To my European ear they sounded like Dutch or Scandinavian English speakers with that distinctive accent. I just read on Wikipedia that 32% of the Minnesota population is Scandinavian in ancestry so I assume that explains the accent.
Can someone enlighten me with a brief history of Minnesota, as state I know nothing about (other than its geographic position, associated climate and football team), in regard to its Scandinavian heritage?
Looking at this Wikipedia page it seems that Scandinavians emigrating to the US settled overwhelmingly in that band of states on the Canadian border, and particularly North Dakota and Minnesota. Why is that the case?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Americans#Scandinavian_Americans_by_state
And finally, as an aside, is the North Dakota accent similar?
Suddenly it makes sense why the football team is called the Vikings anyway!
Part of it was the timing. Some parts of Minnesota were opened for settlement starting earlier, but the major land cessation treaties with the Ojibwe and the Dakota were executed from the late 1840s through 1860s. That fits nicely with the timing of Scandinavian immigration. During the 1840s and 1850s, Scandinavians were settling more in Iowa and Wisconsin, but there was some settlement in Minnesota. (There were enough by 1857 that there was a discussion during the Minnesota Constitutional Convention which was held that year as to whether to publish a translation of the Constitution in Swedish or in Norwegian and Swedish.) When the first big surge of Scandinavian immigrants happened in the mid to late 1860s (driven by demographic and economic factors in Norway and Sweden), lots of Minnesota was available for settlement. The Homestead Act, signed in 1862, allowed settlers to claim 160 aces of federally owned land.
The Northern Pacific Railroad and the State of Minnesota both wanted to settle the area and promoted Minnesota as a destination and their advertisements and accounts from successful settlers encouraged Norwegians and Swedes to view Minnesota as a good destination. Once enough Swedes and Norwegians were here, the familiar process of chain migration worked its magic.
(The North Dakota accent is quite similar. I am no linguist, but think of it as being a stronger version of the Minnesota accent. My cousin from Western Minnesota, near the border, sometimes sounds like she just stepped off the boat from Norway.)
Sources: https://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/immigration/scandinavian3.html http://www.mnhs.org/newspapers/swedishamerican/migration http://www2.mnhs.org/library/findaids/lb00012.pdf (a document from the Minnesota Historical Society's collection that appears to be a translation of a Swedish-language publication touting Minnesota as a destination for immigrants) http://mnhum.org/Uploads//Map%20of%20Major%20Land%20Cessions%20in%20Minnesota%20Treaties.pdf http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/12/v12i03p247-280.pdf