Riker's American Nationality.
- Thread starter T'Girl
- Start date
There are at least two different American accents in which the omission of the "-g" in "-ing" is very common: The so-called Minnesota/Wisconsin accent that one finds near the Canadian border, and the American Southern accent. There's a stereotype that possessing the American Southern accent -- or at least the working class variation of the American Southern accent -- means that one must not have a good education, but that's not necessarily true -- and it's certainly not true for Minnesota accents.
Palin's accent is much closer to a sort of Minnesota/Wisconsin accent than anything else, though even that's not exactly what she has.
And I just remembered, Janeway seemed to be much more fond of bringing up how she grew up in Indiana, far more than Riker did about Alaska. Does that mean Indiana achieved sovereignity by the 24th Century?
Since Archer's time, there was a one-world government. One stipulation of Federation membership, as Picard said himself, was that a member world had to have a one-world government.
So Picard probably meant it loosely, or that since Alaska was once (in that sense) part of the USA, technically Riker was an American. Just as Picard is French, or even Worf, he grew up in Minsk so he is Belorussian lol.
So Picard probably meant it loosely, or that since Alaska was once (in that sense) part of the USA, technically Riker was an American. Just as Picard is French, or even Worf, he grew up in Minsk so he is Belorussian lol.
The show takes place 300 years in the future. Who the hell knows what kind of accent people have in Alaska at that point?
Simplest answer, possibly? Riker is American-Alaskan, in the same sense as Irish-American, or Afro-Caribbean-British now One bit ancestry and history, one bit current locality. Maybe Alaska is still part of the USA and then part of United Earth and the Federation, maybe there's no USA so there's one less level in there. Either way, he's Alaskan, but also spiritually American.
Just a mention: we've been through this a thousand times before (not with you, I mean in general on this board), and it has been pointed out that French people that speak English very well (because of their job or because they learned it at a young age) usually have a British accent, since it's the way it's usually taught in Europe ,and they mostly interact with British or other European people. Just sayin'.
I've heard lots of Alaskans speak, and I'd say at least two-thirds of them sound like "Westerners" to me, meaning they sound as though they're from one of the big western states, that swath from Colorado to Idaho. The remaining third of Alaskans sound like Upper Midwesterners, which is to say they have the nasal "a" and the "gargled" "o".
From the view point of most Europeans, when it comes to english, the British don't possess an accent, the Americans do.
Fair enough. Although there are many different regional accents in the UK, at least as many as in the US even though it's a much smaller area.
There still is a United States of America in Trek's time. It's merely a subset of a larger group, United Earth. (States still exist in the USA, don't they? Same story here.)
