Back when I was 6, I was a fairly stupid kid stuck on a back window of a 1994 Toyota Corolla, thinking “ah, so Spaniards only speak Spanish, French speak French, Hungarians Hungarian – it is only Croats who have so many different ways of speaking!!!! I love it!!!”.
Fast forward 16 (sheeesh, time flies) years after that, I have only grasped how different languages are. And how vastly different dialects can be. For example, Croatia has this specific type of dialect called “bednjanski govor”, which comes from a village of Bednja, and is very different and difficult to understand for a good part of the Croatian folk. Slovenia has Prekmurje Slovene, which was painfully difficult to understand when I came to Slovenia for the first time. My father, a fluent speaker of German language says that he cannot understand his Swiss colleagues.
How’s the situation like in Europe? Are there any regions that have a specifically heavy dialect difficult to understand for other speakers of the language?
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Allemanic dialects – so Swiss German, Vorarbergerisch and Schwäbisch. The rest of Austria speaks Bavarian dialects, so Vorarlberg is the odd one out for us.
Nearly every Flemish city has its own dialect, however many have slowly gone lost over the years, however, in Bruges, Ghent and Aalst you’ll sometimes still hear the real dialect being spoken, and to people who are not from there it’s nearly impossible to understand it at first. In Limburg they also have a dialect (but as far as I know it’s not really spoken anymore) which uses a completely different system even. They use tones in their language which changes the meaning of words etc, which is almost a different language
For Swiss German (yes that’s its own language and not a dialect of German) it’s the dialect spoken in the Upper Wallis. There are same others that aren’t always easy to understand (Appenzell, certain dialects of Central Switzerland or Graubünden, etc.), but none are as hard to understand as the dialect from upper Wallis.
Prekmurje dialect is difficult for every slovenian not from that area, they speak weird lol. They also have some words for common things that the rest don’t use. They are the most remote part of Slovenia, so it kinda makes sense.
The dialect around Idrija is quite strong, and I don’t live that far from there. But they have a strong melody and swap the g sound for h sound often, so it ends up sounding really hardcore hillbilly style. It is understandable, but sometimes it is shocking that the person is actually not being intentionally ridiculous.
Other than that, every region has its own dialects, some more strong than others, depending on history, how far they were from the main routes etc. Usually dialects are understandable, but people also regulate their own speech, depending on who they speak too, a fellow local, or not.
There are tons. Genuine Dalecarlian are probably the most notorious, especially north of the Siljan lake with Älvdalen, Våmhus etc.
But there are plenty of others too. Other infamous ones include everything from Bondska in the north to Listerlandic in the south. Some Ostrobothnian dialects over in Finland can prove very difficult for Swedes too, Närpes being the typical example.
Sønderjylland has heavy dialects. And the plural is intentional, as there are quite a few related but distinct ones down there that are really tough for the rest of us
I’m norwegian, and I was born and raised in the northwest (Møre og Romsdal Municipality).
Recently I moved to Rogaland Municipality in the southwest and I underestimated the difficulty i’d have understanding certain local dialects here. Some of these people sound like they’re speaking danish!
I grew up in north east Germany and have a cousin who is the same age as me, who grew up in rural Bavaria. When we were kids, before we really understood what a dialect is, I struggled a lot to understand him. We never met very often, maybe once or twice a year and I didn’t know anyone but him and his family from Bavaria, so I never had much of a chance to get used to the dialect otherwise. His parents would just change the way they spoke slightly when they talked to me, but as a child he did not.
Today, knowing what a dialect is, it’s slightly less difficult, but I still struggle.
In Norway, I find people from Trøndelag are the hardest to understand, together with Setesdal and a few areas in Western Telemark. But I guess it always depends what sort of dialect you start with.
Welcome to Italy, where even while speaking not only the same language (Italian) but even the same dialect (Neapolitan, recently recognized as a language by UNESCO together with other dialects present in Italy) you may have mayor difficulties understanding someone living but a few km away from you.
Guess what happens when speaking different dialects lol
Majorcan Catalan sounds weird for other Catalan speakers.
We tend to pronounce vowels in their closed form (*ə* in places where other dialects have *ɛ* or *a*) so it can be harder to understand. And we use some words and verbal forms that in the mainland went out of use several centuries ago.
Most people would say that the most difficult dialect is that of the Açores, and by that they usually mean the dialect of the largest island, São Miguel. But I actually don’t think it’s hard to understand at all, at least how the average person there talks (maybe the fact that I have friends and a roommate from there helps). The way people speak in Rabo de Peixe though, that’s hard to understand.
Oh for sure. We’re having a bit of a discussion the last few years about what is a dialect and what is a separate language, so some things that were classified as a dialect in the past have now been rebranded to (regional) languages. For example Low Saxon and Limburgish.
But aside from those there’s, among others, things like Zeelandic, Kerkraads (related to but very different from Limburgish), Gronings (sort of mix between Low Saxon and Frisian), etc. Plus a tiny bit of West Flemish which is similar to Zeelandic and a tiny bit of East Flemish which is similar to Brabants but I’ve never heard anyone with a really strong Brabantian dialect.
Sardinian, as it is a language on its own completely unrelated to standard Italian and the dialects in the rest of mainland Italy and Sicily.
For an actual Italian dialect, the most difficult to understand probably is the Barese dialect.
Absolutely!
Italy is full of dialect, and many of them are quite unintelligible to people of other regions.
Even within the same region there can be quite major differences, and sometimes even within the same city there are smaller differences… though I think that last one is changing a little.
It’s said that up until the 19th century you could understand which of the four quarters of Palermo a person came from by the words they used, but that’s not true anymore…
Yes, [Resian](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpBFBBHtcQ) is from another world. [Isolated](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resia,_Friuli) from the rest of Slovenian-speaking area and our political reality, they have developed in their own way which is not really intelligible with other Slovenian dialects (except maybe those closest).
In Slovakia it is quite simple: in general, if you’re from the West, you understand Easterners the least and vice versa. Most people speak relatively closely to the “official” pronunciation, but if we’re speaking about dialects only, it is in general, how far from your dialect in the dialect continuum is the second person. Western dialects are harder than most, missing most if not all of the palatal sounds. Central dialects are soft with prominent palatalisation and some dialects (though very rare) preserve a distinction between *ä* and *e*. Eastern dialects are typical for their placement of stress, which falls on the penultimate syllable, contrasting with the stress being on the first syllable in other dialects, which gives the eastern ones a typical vibe. The eastern dialects aren’t as soft as the central ones, though not as hard as the western ones. A very interesting thing is that both western and eastern dialects have lost *ť* and *ď* (/c/ and /ɟ/ resp.). The eastern dialects have merged them with *c* and *dz* (/t͡s/ and /d͡z/ resp.), whereas the western ones have merged *ť* with *c* and *t* (/t/), and *ď* with *dz* and *d* (/d/). That creates some words that are very similar in both dialects even though they are far apart. There is also a special category of dialects – the southern slovak dialects, which are heavily influenced by hungarian, since these areas have been historically the most affected by magyarisation in the 19th and 20th centuries. They are specific because of how the people speaking those dialects pronounce certain vowels (whose qualities are more akin to the hungarian equivalents) and consonants (e.g. merging /x/ with /h~ɦ/.) Thanks for coming to my Tedtalk. Also, I am not a linguist, please correct me if you find errors!
Sure, there are many dialects all which are hard to understand to a certain degree. I am from the western part of the country. It’s hard for me to understand people from the south like Brabants or Limburgs. Some have a slight accent and sometimes uses words I don’t know or have a meaning which I am unfamiliar with.
Others have a stronger accent and when they speaking in their dialect it’s very hard to understand as a non native.
I once had a colleague from Flanders, Belgium. They speak Flemish which is perfectly understandable as a Dutchman. Probably 95% is understandable although they use words we don’t and vice versa. And you can clearly hear the difference in sound. But we can easily watch each others tv shows and so on. However, this colleague had a phone call I heard in their local Flemish dialect. It sounded as familiar as Japanese to me.
You will have a lot of regional language but they are not widely used (mostly in private circles, and even there it’s not super common, those languages are not widely taught in schools), most people will speak your standard french, only some words differs. Afaik it’s a bit different in the otherseas territories.
Accent can be quite diverse tho.
Believe me, the average croatian could not understand what some old istrian dude talking is dialect is saying
The Kerry accent can be very strong. Here is an extreme example [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pit0OkNp7s8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pit0OkNp7s8) (yes he’s speaking English!) I would be impressed if you can even partially understand him. I’m Irish and even I struggle!
Ulster Irish is fairly different from other Irish dialects.
Probably Silesian if it comes to Polish. Silesian is really hard, if not impossible to understand if you don’t speak it
The dialect they speak in Zakarpattia (Transcarpathia)
Scouse in the UK is one dialect I think many struggle with.
Edit: Also some people find it hard to understand some Scottish accents, and that’s without including people speaking Gaelic.
So I’m Basque and it has so many variations, starting with one part of it being in Spain and the other in France (so you can imagine how wild the accents get). Each region has its own variation and then each town its very specifical one. You can find words only used in one town, or specific ways of conjugating verbs. So someone from Bizkaia would say “gustatzen jata” (I like it) when the standard is “gustatzen zait”; I could go on with the list but just know sometimes is almost impossible to understand each other, even when speaking with people from the same region (bonus points if they’re from the coast).
I’m ignorant on how it is in other countries so what I’m about to say might be in no way unique to dutch but here in Belgium at least I think it’s important to understand that outside of REALLY formal matters, like court level stuff, nobody truly speaks ABN, or “normal dutch”. It would be truly weird if somebody did and they would stand out. Frankly, I would assume the person who did wasn’t natively dutch and was still learning the language.
It’s one of those things you hear from people trying to learn dutch here.
I obviously speak differently to a customer compared to my friends but in both cases the dialect is still there, people will still know what general region I’m from based on it. Some even guessing the city of 20k people I grew up in.
So most people basically dance around the normal language with different accents and dialects depending on region.
But again, most of these regions can go full dialect making is basically impossible to understand by people from other regions. When our classmate from Brugge went all West-Flemish on our ass in the center of Ghent we often had to ask him to tone down the dialect/repeat himself for example.
Many people when speaking with a heavy dialect on television will also be subtitled even though they technically speak dutch.
Plattdeutsch, aka northern german. Sounds like sober dutch. My grandma was from lower saxony and when she was really furious she’d switch to platt and I had no chance to understand what she said.
We only have one, Silesian. Due to all the others being pretty much the same, the Silesians sometimes feel like they speak a separate language. But prof. Jan Miodek says they don’t have enough words and I trust prof. Miodek unless he’s trying to tell us “kartofel” is less German than “ziemniak”. Cope and seethe kartofel enjoyers, “ziemniak” is the correcter word.