Let’s say you’re in a big city in your country, the kind of place that acts as a hub for people from all over the country. You meet a stranger and get talking:
– Can you accurately guess where they’re from?
– How accurate can you be with guessing? To within a region? Within a district? Within a city or town?
– How long would it take you? Are a few words enough or do you need a bit of a conversation to pick up on nuances?
13 comments
>Can you accurately guess where they’re from?
No, unless it’s someone from Tatra mountains and talks like a góral or from Silesia and talks like a ślązak. Polish language is very homogenous compared to other languages, so I’m pretty sure most Poles can’t tell where someone is from just by hearing them talk.
Sometimes you can guess because of the vocabulary but only sometimes.
I feel like I can pretty well but I’m.not sure how to test it
I’m from the uk
Kinda, some accents are as local as one side of a city. But there is also a few non geographical accents and people often have a bit of their parents accent thrown in.
Yes, you can usually tell which village someone is from. Obviously those living in that area.
Yes but only with eastern and Bratislava / western accent.
yeah, most dialects are easy enough to locate. Some are difficult or too localized for anyone outside to really pinpoint it, but it’s generally easy to tell where someone is from when they speak in dialect.
If they speak Hochdeutsch (high german) however, which is the standad dialect taught in all of germany, then you won’t be able to tell apart from maybe some clues though different words, phrases or expressions.
In Italy it is super easy to guess where someone is from, accents are very different. Unless they speak perfect Italian as the one you normally only hear on TV news, or dubbed foreign movies.
I can easily understand. Thanks to tv shows..
https://youtu.be/OZmKsYGmHEE
For people that live close to my home-state, I can tell the exact village or valley they are fromm, because the dialect it is different in each valley/village.Everybody else I can at least hear from which state they are from.
It depends a lot. If it’s an accent from broadly anywhere else in Portugal I can identify the region, but that’s it.
If it’s someone from the north, however, specifically above the Douro line, I can identify the accent down to the district, sometimes the city in certain cases.
Some are very obvious from pronounciation and it doesn’t take long at all to pinpoint them, while others are a bit more on the cadence and musicality so they take a bit longer to id.
Something that is not often taken into account: how well you yourself know all the varieties of your language. If you only speak the one dialect of your language, and you are only exposed to this dialect of your language, and if you don’t travel, or your media doesn’t expose you to other varieties of your language, you can be very ignorant of the linguistic diversity of your language.
There are a few provinces with really distinct accents that you can distinguish quickly, probably after a couple of words. A bit simplified: people from Groningen put a lot of emphasis on the T and don’t pronounce the last few letters of a word, Frysians have a funny rythm, Brabants is a softer accent (it has less of a throaty G for example) and Limburgs is even softer and sounds a bit like Flemish (Belgian) Dutch. The difference can be as big as the difference between a Scottish, Irish and Cockney accent.
Some big cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the Hague all have their own accents as well. It can be a bit harder to hear them, but if someone has a thick accent it’s still obvious.
The different pronunciation of the G should at least tell you if someone is from the north or south.
In Galician you can pinpoint dialects every 30km² or less; every area has a single trait that makes it unique despite all of them being intelligible with each other (and Portuguese).
Each of those traits expand over big areas but when superimposed to each other make a very unique pattern:
[http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dUPMaFRYV6Q/VOzcdy7XEuI/AAAAAAAACMY/awc5VuDjY5s/s1600/Galician_linguistic_areas.PNG](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dUPMaFRYV6Q/VOzcdy7XEuI/AAAAAAAACMY/awc5VuDjY5s/s1600/Galician_linguistic_areas.PNG)