Nicole, What Is that Accent?

As this season of Big Brother goes on, there are a lot of questions on everyone's mind. Is Devin ever going to stop being a jerk? Will your showmance survive to the end? What's going on between Zach and Frankie anyway? And what on earth is Nicole's accent? From the moment Nicole first introduced herself as a small town girl from Ubly, Michigan, we've all been distracted from her words by the very thick accent in which she says them. Is everyone from Ubly sporting an accent that... cool?

To be honest, Nicole's accent doesn't really sound like a Midwestern accent. It sounds like a mishmash of accents layered over a Midwestern one. As fun as it is to listen to her pronounce pants like it's a two-syllable word, her accent is giving us a lot of flashbacks to other media. Not that I'm saying that Nicole is faking her accent for TV — you couldn't fake an accent like that — but there's just something about the way Nicole speaks that makes it sound like she's picked up a lot more than just an Ubly dialect.

Is there a chance that Nicole saw one or all of the following inspirations that might have changed the way that she talks? We have no way of knowing that until the girl herself admits it, but we certainly wouldn't be surprised to find out that Nicole's accent was inspired in part by the media. Films and television change the way we think and the way we view the world, so why wouldn't it change the way we talk, too?

1. Fargo

Fargo, the film and the television show, is set in Minnesota and that really comes across in everybody's accents. There are some Midwesterners who swear up and down that they don't talk like that, but, to the rest of the country, they may as well. Maybe Nicole is a huge Fargo fan.

2. Drop Dead Gorgeous

Drop Dead Gorgeous is another film that was set in Minnesota and featured a cast that did their admirable best to communicate that with their accents. Then again, this was a black comedy film about beauty pageant contestants dropping dead and, from the way Nicole describes her hometown, there probably aren't even enough people to fill out a beauty pageant.

3. Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin is memorable for a lot of things — mostly how good of an impression Tina Fey does of her — but her Midwestern-Alaskan accent is something that people will never forget. There are times when Nicole sounds a little like Sarah Palin might have been her voice coach because her Midwestern accent has a little something else to it, just like Palin's.

4. Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Grace the secretary in Ferris Bueller's Day Off was sporting a Midwestern accent of her own that Nicole might have wanted to emulate. After all, Ferris Bueller is one of those classic movies that everyone has seen or should see and Grace was a funny part of it. Of course, there's always the chance that Nicole's accent is just her natural accent and if we visited Ubly then we'd find 800 and something people who sound exactly like her. Until someone confirms that, then I'm going to keep asking: Nicole, what is that accent?