In italy its very clear to recognise if someone is from south or north instantly. But you cant just know the region. Except for Tuscany, every time i speak they recognise us in a millisecond, and the fact it is we have our own characteristics unique in Italy, like the correct alternations in the words of open and closed vowels, [s] and [z] in intervocalic position etc.. but there is one big thing: tuscan gorgia. It is a dialectal feature so heavy in speech and nearly impossible to hide. All intervocalic [k, t, p, b, d, g, t͡ʃ, d͡ʒ] become in order [h or x, θ ɸ β ð ɣ ʒ ʃ], these sounds do not exist in italian. All of these in some cases and in fast speech disappear completely. Basically hearing a tuscan there is a so heavy dialectal pronounciation it is impossible not to identify. The hypothesis of the gorgia is mainly etruscan substrate, spoken in Tuscany at least up to 2nd century AD.
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Eastern Slovak accent because it’s constantly mocked and made fun of
If you were austrian you’d be able to distinguish at least 5 dialect groups easily.
Western, rather swiss accent.
Central alpine region.
Southern alpine region (state Carinthia, bordering to Italy)
South Eastern (state Styria, bordering to Slovenia)
And north eastern (for sure the most spoken accent)
There are several. Besides north, south and soutwest being more general, there’s gotländska from Gotland, scanian from Scania, småländska from Småland, göteborgska from Gothenburg, värmländska from Värmland, the Stockholm accent, the accent of the coast of Norrbotten, the northern accents of mid-Norrland, the accent of Gnällbältet (the Whine Belt), and several pretty specific accents of cities in the mid-south.
I may not be able to always guess the specific town/city, but you can generally tell what region someone is from unless they’ve moved and sanded down their original accent.
The most distinct is probably sønderjysk (South Jutish). It’s hard to explain, but the phonetics are rather different, and if someone talks in heavy dialect, it’s almost impossible for someone from, say, Copenhagen to understand them
As a rule of thumb, the farther you go south, the stronger the accent gets.
That’s because in northern Germany, people traditionally spoke low German dialects but the usage of these dialects decreased dramatically over the last decades and most people now speak something more or less like standard German with some regional specifications.
While in the south the upper German variants remained much more in use. Especially features like the rolled R or the sharp S at the beginning of a word are very characteristic for the south.
But even there dialects are declining and some traditionalists in Bavaria already complained that children nowadays pick up more and more “northern” speech habits from the media.
Brabantian/Limburgish are instantly recognisable because they have a way of pronouncing words that can be very different from Standard Dutch. Especially characteristic is the way they pronounce the letter G which is much less harsh/gutteral than it is in Standard Dutch.
But Frisian and eastern (Low Saxon) accents are also easy to identify. For the most local accent you can easily identify it would probably be the city dialects: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague in that order.
In Spain they are extremely noticeable, and extremely present. Mainly where the three other languages are spoken: Galician, Basque, Catalan, with not only phonetic influence but interference in grammar too.
Spanish accents are also quite distinguishable between them too in Andalusia, Castile, Canary Islands, Aragon, not to mention the Americas, but that’s no longer our concern.
The most recognisable, as in most people here will be able to tell you where they’re from would be Glasgow and the surrounding areas. The most distinctive would probably be Orkney or Shetland, but as most people in Scotland have probably never met someone from these places and they’re accents you never really encounter in the media people might struggle to place them.
For the UK on the whole surely it’s got to be Scouse (from Liverpool in England). It’s a very distintive, strong accent, closely followed by Geordies (from Newcastle, England).
In the Catalan-speaking world I’d say the most recognizable are the people from the Balearic Islands. As most island dialects, their dialects are generally among the most conservative, so they preserve some ways to speak that the people from the continent have lost. Furthermore, one can easily recognize someone from there by just hearing the ungodly amount of schwas they use in every word and the use of the “article salat” (instead of saying “el bolígraf” = “the pen”, say “es bolígraf”).
The people who speak septentrional Catalan dialects that live in the Pyrenees Orientales department of France tend to be easily distinguishable too because of the influence of French pronunciaton.
The slang of Helsinki is immediately recognisable, as is a thick Tampere dialect.
I’d say you’re not entirely correct.
It’s true that, most of the time, you can at least recognise the north/south divide, but most of the time, you can also get the region, if you had a little bit of exposure to its accent(s).
The Rome accent it’s probably as recognisable as the Tuscan one, and the same is true for the Neapoligan accent, which is completely different from the Apulian and Calabrese accents, that are all from the south. The same goes for the Venetian accent: very different from every other northern accent.
Mots people can even recognise certain sub-regional accents. For example, I’m from Lombardy, and I can immediately tell if someone is from East or West Lombardy. I know some people from Calabria that can tell if someone is from northern or southern Calabria, same from Easr/West Sicily. And even here I’m oversimplifing because there are also certain ultra specific accents that are very recognisable, like the Bergamo or Brescia accent.
The Azores. Especially São Miguel, it takes us a while to understand what they are saying).
Here’s a clip with Portuguese subtitles
https://youtu.be/u7efyRaaTUU
Gjakova and the Tetova dialect of Gheg Albanian.
Gjakovas dialect is cleaner than the other Albanian dialects in Kosova atleast.
Instead of using the -u ending of certain words, Gjakovars use -i. (Juniku—–>Juniki) ,
verb endings:
instead of using -um (like in central and east Kosova) , they use -em (kthehum——>kthehem)
Gjakovars tend to use rr instead of the normal r a lot too.
They generally tend to use more nasal sounds than the average kosovar.
While the Pollog Dialect spoken by Albanians in Northern Macedonia is very weird even for the average Gheg.
Instead of -i, they use aj
Shpi—–>Shpaj
Silesian is probably the most distinct accent, immediately recognizable.
The Helsinki slang is instantly recognizable, as is the Savonian dialect.
Very dependent. Aberdonian and Glaswegian are probably the big ones but there’s a lot. I live about 10km from where I grew up and just a few weeks ago I met a guy in my village for the first time and he instantly recognised I didn’t grow up here from my accent. He thought I was from somewhere else that I didn’t live in tho which was ridiculous since although I wasn’t far from there, the accents are still very different.
The most distinctive and recognisable accent in Wales would be the valley accent, some would say it’s a happy or ‘sing-songy’ accent depending on who’s speaking. I guess the region’s location plays apart as it’s somewhat isolated.
I’d say the accents in the north are more softer than the accents in the south. You can also hear this when they speak [Welsh](https://youtu.be/ufKf4eORcKA)
Scientifically around a dozen regional accents are in Hungary, but the differences are relatively small. Except for “palóc” és “szögedi”, both different in how they pronounce the “closed e” vowel. Most other hungarians does not handle the closed and open “e” differently.
Hungarian is very, very boring in this sense.
We have so many dialects, existing as distinct entities on levels as local as farm clusters (I can hear which corner of my municipality of 12 000 people someone is from based on the peculiarities of their speech), that the amount of contenders is formidable. The Bergen and Trondheim dialects are honorable mentions because they’re very distinct dialects that are also associated with places where the local identity is also particularly strong. The Setesdal dialect and the dialects found in the Troms area are infamous for being difficult to understand for outsiders.
Norway has a ton of accents. Bergen is probably the most nationalist about theirs, but even small islands can have different accents from the North and South ends that are distinguishable
Within Galicia, I think that the accent from Vigo/Cangas/Bueu/Moaña area is very recognizable and differenciated. Also the people from A Costa da Morte areas where they have ‘gheada’ and ‘seseo’, of course.
Within Galicia, I think that the accent from Vigo/Cangas/Bueu/Moaña area is very recognizable and differenciated. Also the people from A Costa da Morte areas where they have ‘gheada’ and ‘seseo’, of course.
We have our fair share of recognizable dialects. But there’s probably four that every Swiss person can easily point out: Bernese, Baseldytsch, the dialect of the Grisons and the one from Valais. The latter two being dialects of the mountainous areas.
Especially the dialect from the “german” speaking part from Valais is really unique in pronuncation and features a lot of unique words that are not used in other parts of the country. When I first met people from there I really struggled to understand my own language for a while.
I would say that pretty much all Greeks sound universally the same, except Cretans. You can tell someone is from Crete from miles away.
Probably Scouse. It’s just so different to everything else
>But you cant just know the region.
Sorry fratè but this is not true at all. Accents across the country are easily recognisable in my opinion
The most recognizable is the accent of Caucasian regions, in places like Chechnya, Ingushetia or Dagestan. Then, there are rural accents of Krasnodar and Stavropol which sounds a lot like rural Ukrainian accent. The accent of the European North of Russia is also easily recognizable, because they reduce vowels, and tend to replace unstressed “a” with “o”.
In many cases in norway the dialect is recognizable because of the people speaking it rather than the dialect itself.. People of western norway has a different “attitude” than people from eastern or northern norway.. If you had been in a room with a bunch of norwegians speaking their different dialect.. you as a foreigner would most likely remember those from western norway the most i assume.. In many places in eastern norway there is more a “sorry for being here”.. while western norway it’s more like “we’re the center of attention”
There are several accent that are quite recognizable but the most well known are at the opposite of France :
-the Ch’ti and Picard in the north of France, the prononciation is really different, like merde (shit) is pronounced merte, Gauthier is pronounced Gautcher (I’m sorry it will probably be easier to understand with the phonetic alphabet but I can’t use it) for an exemple of it you can listen to it in this video : https://youtu.be/1747NAlcUeM
My family is from this region so I understand it quite well, but I had some client from Picardie that were really hard to understand
-The marseillais or sud ouest : it’s a bit more singing, the french is quite a flat language but not in the south where words at the end are accentuated https://youtu.be/AdJAHl91JU4
I would say, the smallest regional accents that people usually can pinpoint are those of Cologne, Berlin, and perhaps Mannheim (all including surrounding areas).
People who are not from the South, can normally also generally distinguish Bavarian from Swebian, but wouldn’t be able to sub-divide them any further.
As a Northener, I have some problems with determining if somebody is speaking anything else. Saxonian sounds very distinctive, but unprepared I couldn’t tell it from Thuringian.
I can recognise a Berlin accent in any language, so I am nominating that one.
There are a bunch of ones that are widely recogniseable. The Ukrainian literature standard is based on the upper Dnipro dialect, aka Poltava dialect, so the more west you go the thicker your dialect is. The Poltava dialect is quite distinct as well, with the tendency to soften the L sound and change wovels closer to O sound, “rounding up”. There’s a general big city way to speak with their own idioms, out of which the Kharkiv one is quite distinct, with them pronouncing the G sound so deep in the throat that it’s basically becomes a wovel. There’s an Odessa “Jewish” one where they don’t roll their R sounds. There’s a broad Western aka Galician dialect where they have different accents in the words and partially preserve old ukrainian sounds, like diphthongs and such, and the Zakarpattian one being the most distinct, with some people even classifying it as a distinct language. There’s also the distinct way that diaspora speaks, aka “Canadian Ukrainians”, with them preserving the old ways of speech before the communist’s changes to bring standard Ukrainian closer to the Russian language. In the latest orthography reforms they were brought back as an alternatives of pronunciation and speech in the standard Ukrainian. There’s also such a thing as surzhyk, which is using Russian words and calques of Russian phrases in Ukrainian, which doesn’t quite have a dialect status since it’s spread across all territory. There are much more actual dialects but those are the ones that are widely known and recognisable