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Wall Of Text. Sorry for the rant. This morning, I happened across the video below while surfing YouTube. The channel is Buzzfeed and the people on it are mostly from/on the west coast. The video is them reacting to people from other countries doing American accents. Yes, the foreign guys and gals (I can forgive them) are doing mostly stereotypical accents of Americans, but the problem I have lies with the people reacting. When the "reactors" start talking about how Midwest accents sound, they get it so wrong that it genuinely angers me. The accent they claim to be "Midwest" is actually (almost exclusively) only heard in northernmost Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin and even then, it's relatively rare. I'm also fairly certain Canadians would agree that the whole "about sounds like a-boot" thing is not very common and is mostly stereotypical. This helps confirm my assumption that (not all but many of) the Americans living on the east and west coasts have NO *expletive* CLUE about the states they call "flyovers". I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri which is arguably the start of the Midwest (i.e. "Gateway to the West" "The Gateway Arch") and I can confidently tell you without a shadow of a doubt that nobody in Missouri sounds like that unless they or their parents originated elsewhere. Last I checked, Nelly does not sound like he just walked off the set of Fargo (his mother used to live behind my grandma in Chadwyck Subdivision #namedrop). Furthermore, if I'm not mistaken*, the accent in areas such as Chicago and St. Louis are beginning to show similarities to a Northeastern dialect; a phenomenon referred to as the NCVS (Northern Cities Vowel Shift NCVS Examples St. Louis corridor). Moreover, many newscasters train themselves to speak with a "Midwest accent" do to the Midwest generally lacking an accent altogether (Quote: "General American" has often been considered to be the relatively unmarked speech of "the Midwest") A video of a bunch of bubble dwelling Hollywood types normally wouldn't turn me into such a whiny opinionated crybaby, but this video just got on my bad side for some reason. It's also worth mentioning that, generally speaking, I don't have a major issue with stereotypes for the most part. THE VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8QbaCIskM0&feature=youtu.be
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