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German is essentially "Default American" since it the most common ethnicity in the US. Concentrations of other ethnicities, like Norwegian in Minnesota, tend to give a region a distinctive ethnic character.
German is "default American"? Since when? I thought the major areas with heavy German influence was essentially only the Upper Midwest (Chicago, WI, MN, MI and OH)? The reason you don't hear people gloating about their German ancestry is LARGER in part due to World Wars I and II, more than its "default" nature.
I live in Polk county Minnesota up in the far northwest part of the state. 41.7 pct Norwegian according to Wikipedia. But in regards to the movie Fargo accent....no one has that strong of an accent.
The Cohen Bros. have a very dry sarcastic sense of humor, in case nobody noticed it.....the accents in Fargo were SUPPOSED to be thick and comical. It adds to the eeriness of the movie, IMO (the dichotomy of the over-the-top nice and almost brain-dead-stupid people, to the hell-on-Earth greedy and villianous types the movie portrayed so differently -- that's how I see it, anyways).
Fargo is an incredible movie (one of my favorites ever!), and the accent does work nicely in it, but it hasn't done many favors for the Upper Midwest stereotype.
Upper Mid-Westerners--namely North Dakotans and Minnesotans--really have made off pretty well in the stereotypes department overall. To my knowledge, they've never been widely stereotyped as illiterate bigots (Southerners/Lower Mid-Westerners), or pushy egoists (Northeasterners), or gun-wielding paranoiacs (Mountain/Interior West), or materialistic a*sholes (Californians), or elitist hipsters (Pacific Northwest).
The question is, how much credit do the Coen Brothers deserve for this?
I believe that most of the stereotypes emigrated from Scandanavia and Germany
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