Palin’s way of talkin’ dissected, you betcha (AP)

When Sarah Palin burst onto the national political stage there was a lot of talk about her distinctive way of talkin’, you betcha. Three University of Wisconsin-Madison linguists tackled the conundrum in a research article to be published in the Journal of English Linguistics next month. The answer lies in something that happened in the 1930s. The UW researchers said people living in Alaska’s Matanuska and Susitna valleys, where Wasilla is located, are largely descendants of farmers who moved there in the 1930s from the Upper Midwest.