I, for instance, have a lot of trouble understanding speech from people who are from the South of the country, especially when they’re talking in full-on dialectal speech?
Is there anything like this in your country where you have a lot of problems understanding? Maybe there’s even one that is notorious for being hard to understand? 🙂
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It might be useful for you to put in the OP that you’re actually asking about dialects of the same language.
In order to make a difference between languages (e.g. Sicilian vs Italian) and dialects of one language (the variety of Italian as spoken by Sicilians vs the variety of Italian as spoken by Milanese, for example). Because there’s going to be Italians here, as always when this same discussion comes up, who confuse ‘dialect’ with ‘regional language’.
The south Kerry accent. It’s fast and thick. Dangerous combination [slow example](https://youtu.be/pit0OkNp7s8)
Well, I would say that the two dialects I’ve got problems with are Älvdalska and Ekshäring. Both of them still have lots of old Norse words and constructions in them, and at least Älvdalska is often considered a separate language from Swedish.
Other than that, I don’t really have trouble with any dialects, but I do know there are lots of other people who find the dialect in the southernmost part of Sweden a bit difficult to understand sometimes.
Proper Swiss German is near intelligible to me. It’s probably as far as you can bend German before having to call it a new language.
Same forPlattdeutsch (“Flat German”) which might as well be another language to me.
(I’m from Munich)
I’m generally quite good with other Scottish accents, the hardest would be one of the Glasgow ones, specifically the nasal type.
For the UK on the whole it’s that inner city South-East England accent, the one that’s like a thicker version of Eggsy in Kingsman. I really struggle with that accent, if they’re in a film or whatever then subtitles come in handy!
Not sure what dialect it really is, I only heard it like thrice but there were these people that spoke so fast you could barely even tell they were speaking Czech. Yet they understood each other perfectly.
Finns understand each others pretty well. The dialects aren’t that strong. Or maybe the ones speaking unintelligeble never left their town.
Scottish. I’m fine with 90% of the Scottish accents but there are some that takes me a minute to acclimate too
Glaswegian by far. Grandparents have a friend who is from there and as kid all I could do was smile and nod along pretending to understand.
I recently saw a vid from somwhere near Derry and I struggled to get what it was he was saying until the 4th listen.
Most English and Welsh accents aren’t too hard to understand for me usually, fast scouse the possible exception.
Well.. in Italy we have “Sardo” from Sardinia: it is a dialect, but in fact, its a completely different language!
More or less the same applies for for all the region in the south of Italy.
My native dialect (Torlakian) is usually considered the most difficult one to understand, while I can understand other Serbian dialects pretty well. But if we consider Serbo-Croatian to be a single language, then Kajkavian dialect would be the most difficult to understand for me.
I’d say the accents from the Kempen are the most difficult for me in daily speech, but I suspect Limburgish would be harder when they’re really talking in a full dialect.
Of course, Dutch accents from the North or East of the Netherlands would be even harder to understand.
The notorious one is the Prekmurje dialect – part of Slovenia east of the river Mura. You just wont understand them. I would say that then in 2nd place comes the Littoral region (I speak this one and people do have problems understanding)
That being said, the dialects differ quite a lot between different regions, and many times there are also certain differences between neighbouring towns.
Azores islands accent / dialect requires subtitles to even grasp what the gist of the conversation is about. But the same would be said about mine, Madeira Islands accent is hard for mainland people.
Well, any kind of Caribbean créole is not particularly inteligible for most native French speakers not from the Caribbean (we can basically catch words here and there and maybe get a vague idea of what’s being spoken about, but it’s remarkably hard to follow given that most of the vocabulary should be pretty familiar), though I suspect the Kanak language would be even more difficult. Looking solely at the mainland, probably Basque… though again, Basque is so weird that it might qualify as the least understandable even in accounting for the overseas territories.
British accents as a whole are pretty easy for me to understand but the toughest I think is accents and dialects in Aberdeen and Dundee. Generally speaking tho I can piece together what people mean and its not too hard