That explains it. Everyone has an accent other than the North. The area represented as "North" on this map has the highest high school graduation rate and college entrance exam scores in the nation. They obviously got a better education than the rest.
The further away from your area the more pronounced you find an accent. The closer you are to an area the more you can differentiate an accent locally. For instance, WJ can loop Kansas City with Indianapolis yet my ear hears a very distinct difference. I also hear distinct differences in Minnesota from the Twin Cities, western Minnesota agricultural plains and the north woods that an outsider might lump together. The Twin Cities is a white collar city where more than half the people I worked with, like me, were not native Minnesotans.
I first talked to my wife over the phone than in person in setting up a date. Her accent totally befuddled me. Her mother though raised by Staten Islanders grew up on Minnesota, and her father from Staten Island in a still German speaking enclave back in the 30s. She grew up moving around pre-kindergarten in New Jersey and Maryland, grade school San Francisco Bay area and high school Cleveland, OH. I first thought she was northern European or German speaking English.
Now some of our Minnesota friends are native New Zealander, Swiss, German, Costa Rican, Jamaican, Somalian, Latvian and Russian. We keep talking to them and we will really mess up our dialect.
