To folks in Indiana, there’s something a bit different about the way Tracey Phillips talks.

So, naturally, they ask where she’s from. She tells them: Minnesota.

“Probably nine times out of 10, they’ll say it back, ‘Minnesooota,’ ” Phillips said. “I’ll say, ‘I don’t sound like that,’ and they’ll say, ‘No, that’s exactly what you sound like.’ “

As it turns out, Phillips has a Minnesota accent — something she didn’t know until 2007, when she moved to Indiana and was suddenly surrounded by entirely new, more southern accents. But these days, her ears pick up on the Minnesota flair, especially when she returns to her hometown of Le Center.

“When I’m with my parents in Minnesota and watching the news, I hear it so much, and I think, ‘That is what everybody (in Indiana) says I sound like,’ ” she said.

Everyone has an accent, and that accent — how we pronounce words — is part of a dialect that also includes the words, phrases and sentence structures unique to our speech.

It’s a dynamic, ever-changing atlas of language defined more by regions than state boundaries.

Someone in Minnesota, for instance, might sound like someone in eastern North or South Dakota, western Wisconsin or northern Iowa — all of which are in a region that predominantly speaks what linguists call Upper Midwestern English.

But for some people, this dialect might be most associated with Minnesota — possibly due in part to the dialects and exaggerated accents heard in Minnesota-set films and television shows, such as the Coen Brothers’ 1996 dark comedy “Fargo.”

“I think people automatically go back to the movie ‘Fargo,’ ” said Caleb Hicks, a Minnesota native and Ph.D. student in the linguistics program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “(People have) brought that up in reference to my accent.”

Before he moved to Chapel Hill, Hicks knew intellectually that he had an accent, but when surrounded by people who speak similarly, one’s own accent can be difficult to detect, he said.

And like Phillips, it wasn’t until he moved out of the region that it actually hit home: He talks like a Minnesotan.

“I think it is a point of pride for me,” he said. “It’s a part of the country that I don’t think is very well represented in most people’s mental conception of dialect in the United States. A lot of people know about southern speech, a lot of people know about speech in New England … but not so much (speech in) Minnesota.”

DISTINCTIONS

Accents often occur in the vowels of words, and in Minnesota, it’s no different.

One of the distinctions associated with speech in the state is the long “o” sound, a prominent feature noticeable to people in other parts of the country, Hicks said.

While other regions would say the “o” in a word such as “Minnesota” as two different sounds, Upper Midwestern English speakers, particularly those in Minnesota, may pronounce it as one flat sound, making the “o” vowel seem longer — a feature called a monophthongal vowel, said John M. Spartz, a Minnesota native and assistant professor in the department of English and philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.

There also are dialect distinctions, such as “come with” — a phrase Spartz, upon leaving Minnesota to attend Purdue University in Indiana, discovered sounds very odd to people in other parts of the country.

“I would say, ‘Come with,’ and people would look at me like I’m crazy,” Spartz said. He added that it sounded to the person like he had not finished his sentence.

Spartz, who went on to write his doctoral dissertation on the “come with” construction, said the phrase is basically a direct translation from the German and Scandinavian languages — languages once spoken frequently in states such as Minnesota and Wisconsin during a period of heavy German and Scandinavian immigration.

Immigrants can drive changes to accents and dialects, and while Minnesota and Wisconsin have very similar accents, Spartz owes the stronger long “o” in Minnesota to its higher number of Scandinavians.

Dan Karvonen, a senior lecturer in Finnish and linguistics at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, said it can be difficult to pinpoint the sources of the regional accent, as there aren’t historical recordings of early immigrants’ speech.

Some sources, Karvonen said, could be Minnesota settlers who arrived with English and Scotch-Irish backgrounds.

The historical influence of other languages on our regional English happened in “weird, twisty ways,” said Joe Salmons, the Lester W.J. “Smoky” Seifert professor of Germanic linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“What Minnesotans do in terms of vowel pronunciation and intonation is not a direct copy — it’s not like they have a Swedish accent or Norwegian accent,” Salmons said. “It’s been through this reinterpretation and development in Minnesota.”

Scandinavians, specifically Norwegians, also brought over “uff da” — an expression familiar to people in Minnesota and Wisconsin but maybe not elsewhere. The word “hotdish” also is regional, as is “Duck, Duck, Gray Duck” — the name for a children’s game known as “Duck, Duck, Goose” outside of Minnesota.

People in Minnesota and Wisconsin also sometimes use the word “borrow” when they mean “lend,” Spartz said.

“That doesn’t happen anywhere else in the country, that I’m aware of,” he said.

But what might be the norm for one Minnesotan might not be so for another; dialect can be thought of as a collection of features that people can have more or less of, Karvonen said.

“There’s so much variation,” he said. “In the Twin Cities, you don’t hear it as much, but if you go to smaller towns and especially northern Minnesota, you start hearing it more and more.”

There also can be a great deal of variation across ethnic and economic lines.

What’s considered standard English in the U.S. is based on northern, upper-middle-class, white, middle-age people, and what’s defined as Upper Midwestern English also is rooted in linguists’ understanding of mostly white speakers, said Erica Benson, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Benson added that linguists have studied African-American English in various regions and now some studies are being done on Hmong English in the Upper Midwest.

“There’s definitely interest in those different dialects among socio-economic, socio-cultural groups, but … when we’re talking about Upper Midwestern English, we’re thinking about one particular racial, ethnic group,” Benson said. “But we certainly shouldn’t forget about the other dialects that are out there.”

THE IRON RANGE

One pocket of Minnesota known for having its own distinct dialect features is the Iron Range.

Beginning in the late 19th century, an influx of immigrants from countries such as Croatia, England, Slovenia and, most of all, Finland came to the area to work the newly established iron ore mines in northeastern Minnesota, said Sara Schmelzer Loss, an Iron Range native and visiting assistant professor of linguistics at Oklahoma State University.

“You had all these speakers of different native languages living in the same communities and working together,” Loss said. “It was a really unique situation that the rest of Minnesota didn’t have.”

That helped create different features of speech over time. One instance of this can be heard in Iron Range speakers sometimes pronouncing certain consonants differently. The second “j” sound in “judge,” for example, might sound more like a “ch” — a feature called “devoicing,” Loss said, adding that it’s a distinction she sometimes hears in her own speech.

Iron Range speakers also may move the word “just” in a sentence, changing what others would say as “You play with just five cards” to “You play with five cards just.”

“It sounds really natural to me to have the ‘just’ at the end,” Loss said, adding that Iron Range speakers also may delete the preposition “to,” changing a sentence such as “Are you going to Virginia?” to “Are you going Virginia?”

Loss, who is from the Hibbing area, wrote her doctoral dissertation on the use of words such as “himself” that can behave like the word “him” on the Iron Range, making for sentences such as “John said that James will loan himself some money.”

“That typically sounds awkward to someone who isn’t from the Iron Range,” Loss said.

Not all Iron Range speakers have those features or use them all the time. Loss’ research indicated that people who feel strong connections to the community are more likely to have them than those who don’t feel those connections, she said.

Loss herself feels a connection to the Iron Range, she said, adding that when she calls her parents or grandparents who live there, she can hear herself for about an hour afterward sounding much more like an Iron Ranger than just a normal Minnesotan.

It would be a shame, Loss said, if she were to lose those features.

CHANGES IN SPEECH PATTERNS

Some features of speech on the Iron Range are being lost as people become more mobile and interact with others outside the community, Loss said, adding that the more interaction someone has with Twin Cities speakers, for instance, the more he or she will sound like them.

But while some distinctions are disappearing, others are developing all the time in the region’s dialects — many that linguists are likely not even aware of, said Benson at UW-Eau Claire.

“Especially in the Upper Midwest, there are new changes coming in,” she said.

One that linguists know about is what’s called the “cot-caught merger” — the loss of the distinction between the vowel sounds in those words, as well as in others, making the two words sound the same.

The distinctions between words such as “cot” and “caught” have “collapsed in most of Minnesota now, and it’s spreading into Wisconsin,” said Salmons at UW-Madison, adding that the cot-caught merger began in central Pennsylvania, moved west and now is moving back east.

“It’s something that’s very easy to pick up — it’s sort of infectious,” he said.

Another change that could be coming is what’s called the “northern cities vowel shift” — changes to vowels that have been established in Great Lakes cities such as Chicago, Buffalo and Cleveland. A speaker with the distinction might say “busses” more like “bosses,” or “block” more like “black,” for example.

“That is a change that is moving in through southern and eastern Wisconsin, and we’re starting to see some evidence of it in the Twin Cities,” Benson said, adding that the change could break up before becoming established in Minnesota.

“It’s one of those things where it’s almost too early to tell,” she said. “We may need a little more time to see how those changes are going to develop.”

Changes to dialect are very slow to occur and may not affect everyone in the same way. Women, for instance, tend to adopt new speech changes before men, although it’s not exactly clear why that is, said Spartz at UW-Stout.

And while people with higher education and socio-economic backgrounds tend to place more value on standard English, shying away from the features that define their regional speech, there also is a desire among many to use speech as a way to identify as part of a group.

“If you’re from Minnesota, you’re proud to be from Minnesota,” said Spartz, who hails from Le Center and went to high school with Phillips. “I hear that I sometimes subconsciously emphasize these things (when speaking) to demonstrate who I am.”

Dialect is big part of identity, telling people things such as where we grew up and who our friends are, Benson said.

Phillips, an instructional assistant at a middle school in Franklin, Ind., said she isn’t offended when people mimic her accent. Minnesota is a part of who she is and she’s proud to call it home.

She’ll even ham up the Minnesota-talk when chatting with fellow Minnesotans, such as a co-worker of hers at school.

“When we pass in the hall, we’ll throw out a ‘Hey, how ya doin’ today?’ ” Phillips said with an exaggerated Minnesota accent.

“It’s fun,” she said. “And it’s our bond, having that heritage.”

Andy Rathbun can be reached at 651-228-2121. Follow him at twitter.com/andyrathbun.