What region of your country is said to have the purest form of your national language?

36 comments

1. I honestly don’t think the purest form of Finnish exists. There are dialects which influenced kirjakieli, the standardised written form of Finnish, more, but you can’t really say that kirjakieli is more pure Finnish than any dialect you might hear in Finland.

2. Much of Northern Germany (excluding the the places where Platt, a Low German language is spoken) speaks Standard German. The policy to wipe out language diversity was sadly largely successful here. Hannover has the image of speaking the “purest” (whatever that means) form of Standard German.

3. I am not sure, but I’ve heard some people say that in Brașov is the nicest Romanian accent

4. Depends on who you ask. Though I’ve heard that in Kiruna/Gällivare, northernmost Sweden, it’s said that they speak the cleanest Swedish. But they do so with a distinct accent.

5. I must say that yes Castille and Leon has it but with some exceptions like Valladolid having laismo and leismo

6. Noone really speaks standard Czech here. I have met several people who think that they do, but in few minutes they always used some form of dialect.

7. Probably the province of Utrecht. Utrecht is bang slap in the middle of the country so it kind of makes sense. People generally see the dutch that is spoken in the ‘Randstad’ (Utrecht + North and South Holland) as the ‘purest’ form of dutch or ‘ABN’ (General Civilized Dutch) but that also includes cities like Rotterdam, The Hague and Amsterdam where locals can have some very heavy accents.

8. Really, no region is really the purest. You can pretty much hear where people are from just by listening. I think the Utrecht region, slap bang in the middle of all accents, has the most neutral (except for the city of Utrecht, which has kind of an accent, although less than the other big cities).

   I do notice accents are disappearing. My village of 4000 people used to have almost an own language. People from one village over would have a noticeably different accent and vocabulary. Now people sound more the same.

9. Language ‘purity’ is much more tied up with social class in the UK than with region. The accepted standard is what’s known as Received Pronunciation (RP), which is generally spoken by upper and upper-middle class people in the South of England (usually in the South-East of England there’s some sort of continuous scale between Cockney/”Multicultural London English” spoken by working class people on one end and RP on the other end, with something called “Estuary English” occupying an intermediate stage).

   Sometimes you’ll hear people talking about “Oxford English”, since Oxford was traditionally the centre of academia in the UK and home to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) – if a word is not in the OED, it is generally not considered an accepted English word. Many of those academics and students were of course disproportionately from the highest strata of society, and so spoke in RP. Oxford is a town in its own right as well though, and you don’t have to go far out of the centre to hear locals speaking with a very distinct accent that sounds quite Westcountry-ish to non-Oxfordian ears

10. Of course it isn’t widely spoken, but there are three main dialects of Irish. The Ulster (Northern), Connacht (Western) and Munster (Southern) accents. I always thought the Connacht accent was the easiest to understand and pronounce.

11. Well, Italian is based on the Florentine vernacular popularised by the works of XIV century writers like Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio and historically it is a literary language more than a language spoken by the man on the street (until the first half of the XX century).

    On the other hand, Florentine has peculiar words and sounds that are not found in standard italian.

12. I’ve heard many times that the Geordie dialect here in Newcastle has been described as being the closest to older English variants as any other dialect or accent across the English speaking world.

    I won’t even pretend to be a historian or an expert but since English is a big mixture everything I don’t know if there’s a true answer.

13. Central Slovakia since their dialect was base for standard Slovak language.

14. Idk about purest but Setesdal is famous for having a very conservative dialect that many struggle with understanding

15. We don’t have people or jobs or anything really but at least we have the best Spanish

16. It’s essentially all the same, almost everyone speaks standard Polish with very minor differences, except for a few select groups that have either their own language or their own strong regional dialect (though these people often can speak standard Polish too).

17. Slightly west of Kaunas. It’s more or less the region where Lithuanian was standardized. However, there’s also the Samogitian dialect, one could say that that one is the most pure.

18. Either Mallorca (specially some old man from an isolated farm) or any little random village lost in the middle of Catalonia.

19. Shotr answer: Lower Silesia.

    Long answer: Polish standard isn’t based on any regional dialect but rather on a literary language that emerged in the late middle ages as a language of the educated elite and it combined features of Wielkopolska and Małopolska dialects, the two main centers of power at the time. Only in the 20th century it started to be used more widely and then ww2 happened. Because most of the pre-war German population of Lower Silesia was expelled and the land was settled by Poles from all regions and even people from beyond Poland, standard Polish became the sole dialect of this region.

20. Probably the western parts of oslo. It’s were the educated elites lived (and still does) when education/reading/writing was a thing not for the common people. It was those places people came from that went to such places as the universities in Copenhagen etc. to get educated back in the time were norway was under danish rule. People from other places in or around the capital has more or less influences from rural parts of the country because many of them historical emigrated to the capital from those rural places.

    The big divide regarding the norwegian language was that one who wanted our language to be the most “danish” .. or those that wanted it most to be like how people spoke it in the countryside (nynorsk). So what you define as purest is a definition of who you are.

    Purest form of the lanugage is often combined with social class.. Those speaking the purest form tend to come from a higher social class.. Because speaking pure/clean (how it is written) is often a way of distinct your class.. Many of classes with lower social status takes pride in not actually being pure/clean in their way of speaking. If your a lawyer or doctor you speak “cleaner” than if you’re a busdriver or janitor.. no matter where you come from. It’s both a pride for both parts. People from northern part of norway f.ex takes great part in the myth/fact that their way of speaking is/tend to be rough.

21. It was said to be [Touraine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touraine), in Western France. Mostly because the writer François Rabelais
    was praising the way people were speaking there, apparently. But nowadays, I don’t think anyone considers there’s a region with the purest form of French. Regarding the accent, I think it’s the Parisian one that would be considered standard.

22. Tours, even though Parisians always think their accent is pure French

23. Definitely Tuscany, however I’ve heard said that the accent from Lucca is especially close

24. I’ve always heard it’s either Toledo and/or Valladolid (Valladolid specifically, not Castilla y Leon as a whole)

25. None as far as I know. Standard Slovene is a completely made-up language. It sounds pretentious when one hears it in movies.

    People used to say there are regions around Celje whose speech is similar, but my personal experience doesn’t confirm that.

26. Standard Danish is based on the dialect spoken in Copenhagen, but today it is said that people from East Jutland, especially around the larger towns of Horsens and Silkeborg, speak the most neutral Danish.

27. Coimbra i think , at least i heard it somewhere , i know no funny accent from Coimbra

28. Gwynedd probably seen as that is where Welsh is most dominant and is in the strongest position these days

29. All of them, commies took care of it. There are Kashubians (who are distinct, Kashubian is a language) and Silesians (who are controversial), but they are small minorities.

30. Written Italian was moulded out of Florentine Tuscan from the XIII century onwards. Spoken Italian, on the other hand, does not reflect Tuscan regionalisms, and “pure” Italian devoid of a regional connotation is something that exists only in stage acting.

31. “Doric” as spoken in the North East of Scotland is probably has the least crossover with English, but as there’s no standardised Scots, it’s inherently multipolar, and it could be argued that the prevalence of Scandinavian loanwords in Doric render it a *less* definitive form of Scots.

32. We don’t have a standardised language, so there’s no reference point for what “pure” even is. If we go by written language, I guess southeastern Norwegian and/or Danish comes closest to bokmål, which is one of two written languages. For the other written language, no dialect really comes close to it.

    For spoken Norwegian I guess the most conservative dialects could be considered the purest ones, so that would give you a different answer for every area in Norway.. Like in Jæren the most conservative version of the local dialect is found around Nærbø. Twenty minutes north and the purest form of the Sandnes dialect is the one in either Soma or among old people in Austrått. Ten minutes north again and the purest form of Stavangersk is arguably the one found in Randaberg. Just across the fjord the one in Karmøy is probably the purest one of that dialect. Further north along the western coast and theres a new idea of pure for every island, inlet and fjord. For the general southern dialect the answer would probably be Mandal. For the other southern dialect that is not quite southeastern yet, it’s probably Arendal. I’m guessing inner Norway would point to Toten or somewhere like that as their purest form. In Setesdalen it’s obviously Valle.

    In general, the most conservative allround Norwegian and thus purest form of it would be either Faroese or Icelandic.

33. Here in Switzerland we just shit on each others ways of speaking, invariably. However from a historical PoV, at least in the western parts, the langue d’oc still spoken in some remote villages would be more “pure” than whatever cursed version of langue d’oil we have stumbled ourselves into.

    But just in order to really insult as many Swiss as possible, I’m going to say oberwallis is the purest form.

34. The common answer you expect to hear is metropolitan Athens, however people from all regions plus northern Epirus, Cyprus, and Asia Minor live in that metropolis, and so you will also hear every regional accent too, especially from those of an older age.

    Generally speaking, it is still Athenians who speak the “purest” form of the language, especially from a certain generation (born in the 1950s and on down). But other urban centres this past generation (approx 30 years) would also qualify as speaking “pure” standard Greek as a default. That being said, even they have a regional and colloquial shibboleths peppered in their speech.

    So yes, metropolitan Athens FTW.

35. There is not “the swiss dialect”. But I think st-gallen-dialect and Aargau-dialect are both very moderate and pleasant to listen to.

36. Pure… Is debatable.
    The standard, official Albanian, similar to Italian, is the offspring of a specific group of writers in the Permet, tosk dialect region, during the Albanian Renaissance and which was then further promoted by our dictator, who, suprise suprise, was from the south (tosk dialect region.)

    However, the north claims its version is the least modified version of Albanian, hence purest, while the south claims its version is oldest. Turth is probably somewhere in the middle. (While the north hasn’t “updated” it’s accent much, its accent is based on a specific accent, that of Gegh, which historically wasn’t used in the whole of Albania, rather just in the north & Kosovo, Montenegro region, with a specific river marking the linguistic divide etc.)

    To most native speaker’s ears, the Permetar-ian accent is as close to accent-free as you can get.
    The rest will tend to cut off some endings, alter some sounds etc.
    Of particular interest is the Q sound. Which hardly any country on earth can pronounce like we do, and the Gegh dilacts can’t pronounce, rather ghegh speakers pronounce it as a /ç/ sound (sounds = ch in ketchup). Curiously enough, that letter is part of our name as a nation, makes one wonder.