If you go to Minnesota where I might find a lot of ancestors, the places that have names from the mother country have no differences from what a place in Sweden might be called. Swedish is spoken in Sweden, In Finland with a very distinctive (and much loved by Swedes) pronounciation. The Americans that learn Swedish as a part of heritage speak it pretty much as americans speak foreign languages. Swedish is not a big language
English, I suppose everyone knows how every person everywhere speaks english, and it seems to be spelled the same.
But the language of Afrikaans, does a Dutch person understand it? Are there like 20 villages in Holland called Bloemfontein?
Does the way your language is spoken in other part of the world have some interesting differences?
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Whether Dutch people can understand Afrikaans depends on the person speaking Afrikaans and how well the Dutch person can understand dialects etc in general. I can usually follow Afrikaans if they’re making the effort to be understandable esp. when they know you’re Dutch, but if you have a few people speaking Afrikaans amongst themselves then it can turn tricky! Kind of similar to Flemish in that regard – don’t have any trouble following regular Flemish of course but to have 2 farmers go at each other in some obscure Flemish dialect, welllllll.
Afrikaans sounds like a pirate trying to explain something to a toddler, which is perfect, because it was Dutch pidgin for sailors from around Europe.
I can understand most Afrikaans, but I can’t speak it beyond ‘braai’, the most important word in Afrikaans.
I don’t know any town called Bloemfontein (flower fountain).
We have Bloemendaal (flower valley), but that’s about it.
Well “colonial” Norwegian is called Icelandic, Faroese and norn
I have had the opportunity to read (and also listen to) the speech of Italian Americans (I suppose the older ones, I think the younger ones definitely speak impeccable English), and it is a sort of mixture of Italian, dialect, English and Italianised English words; an interesting language for sure, even if not always easy to understand.
Spanish remains pretty standardized across all Spanish-speaking languages since we have a special supranational organization called “Real Academia Española” (Royal Spanish Academy) tasked with monitoring the Spanish language in all aspects. They’re responsible of promoting the right spelling, ortography, grammar, etc in all Spanish-speaking countries and essentially controls and changes the rules that apply to Spanish.
That being said, each country obviously has particular regional differences which the Royal Academy acknowledges, be it in words, expressions or grammar. I’ve found for example as a Spaniard, that our Latin American cousins tend to use more anglisized words and also use older Spanish words which are no longer used or have been replaced in Spain.
As a Spanish speaker you would understand between 95% to 99% of other Spanish speakers since the grammar and spelling are the same, the only difference coming from regional aspects such as localized words and expressions. Still, it’s amazing how varied the Spanish language can be depending on the country and that makes it more interesting and exciting.
> English, I suppose everyone knows how every person everywhere speaks english, and it seems to be spelled the same.
Actually, no. Even if we’re just talking about American Vs British English, obviously we understand each other 99% of the time but there is actually a greater linguistic barrier than you (or even Brits/Americans) might think. We obviously know all the main Americanisms like elevator, truck etc but there are plenty of more obscure ones that we don’t know (eg. rutabaga Vs swede). It’s even worse in the opposite direction as Americans have much less exposure to British English. If I go to the US I can’t use even the most simple Britishisms. I collaborate with people in the US who are used to talking to scientists from outside the US and yet even with then I very often end up confusing them by using a more obscure Britishism and end up having to clarify afterwards.
Then there’s Australian/NZ English which is almost as different as American English but we have much, much less exposure to it. I went on a camping trip with a bunch of Aussies and they say a lot of very confusing stuff. So for instance instead of saying “How did it go” they’ll say “How did *you* go”.
And then there are places like SA, India, Singapore etc which have their own written varieties of English that are as distinct as British vs American English. Usually they have several registers where the topmost register isn’t an issue but where we might find it hard to follow if they were speaking it among themselves.
In spanish from South America they don’t use perfect tenses. Pronunciation and vocabulary are a bit different but we can understand them.
There’s lots of variations of the English language. It’s definitely not the same everywhere you go. Not only is there differences between Scots English & the “standard” English language, there’s massive differences between British English and American English, I’m pretty certain there’s also major differences across South Africa, Australia & New Zealand
Brazilian portuguese sounds very very different to the way we speak. They use different words for some/most everyday things , the word order is very often different, and sometimes they omit some pronouns altogether. Not to mention the totally different accent.
If it weren’t for Brazilian soap operas’ and shitty funk music’s popularity, noone would understand anything being said in Brazilian Portuguese.
Well, many centuries ago, we conquered just the homelands of the Habsburgs, yet we understand their Austrian Standard German pretty well. Their Easterners (think Vienna) might have bigger problems understanding the Swiss dialects though 😉
^(Nichts für ungut Ösis, wir lieben euch doch!)
I think its important to note with Spanish that there is no “latin american” spanish as I’ve heard from many foreigners. The difference between each country or even regions spanish in latinamerica (example: northern mexican to chilean) is as larger or larger in between themselves than to the spanish spoken in a region of Spain.
I think the thing we might all have in common in latin america is the lack of past perfect in favor of simple past.
Catalan is not spoken as a majority language in any settlement outside europe, so we can only compare it with european terroritories colonised by medieval catalans. Even though some European varieties of catalan can be pretty different from each other in certain aspects (alguerès, in Sardinia, is very “exotic” to catalan mainlanders, for example), we still understand each other with no problems at all.
Not colonial but Swiss Italian is different from standard Italian in that it has obviously more loanwords from French and German, especially in bureaucracy. For example, they will say licenza di condurre instead of patente di guida when referring to a driving licence.
Südwesterdeutsch split from Standard German at a relativly late stage, so it is still pretty close. It does have a fair share of loanwords from Afrikaans, English and a few native languages (as well as a few from Portugese), though.
Texasdeutsch split earlier and has a lot of loanwords from English. It’s still intelligible, though.
Pennsylvanian Dutch developed from a dialect and is very hard to understand for anyone from a different dialectal background.
Unserdeutsch is a creole, so it is pretty different from Standard German, both in grammar and vocabulary.
Edit: I forgot Plautdietsch. It’s a variety of Eastern Low German, and as such is almost unintelligible to a speaker of Standard German. I have no clue how well speakers of current Low German can understand it.
[“Küchendeutsch”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namibian_Black_German) reads like a very simplfied version of German, but never heard one speaking it.
But it seems it’s dying out in favour of “proper” german
Edit:
I also knew a guy with Volga German backgroung, but he spoke normal German with russian accent
Finns had no colonies that I know of. Closer to being a colony before than owning one, and you touched on the Fenno-Swedish already.
Afrikaans is kinda understandable in like songs, having a conversation between a afrikaans speaker and a dutch speaker doesn’t really work though. You can’t have a full conversation. This always becomes really apperent when a dutch interviewer is talking to someone like trevor noah and they just get completely lost within two sentences.
It’s also not a version of Dutch, it’s a daughter language of Dutch.
Interestingly the Dutch in Suriname is just slightly formal Dutch.
Well Slovak is very different, some even call it a different language, but we can still understand each other so that’s pretty cool.
/s obviously
Brazil: very different accent (differs by the region), quite a lot of different vocabulary, really different (wrong :)) grammar. Usually fully understandable but less so the more colloquial the speech is.
Africa: just the usual differences of a normal dialect: mostly just some slightly differing pronunciation; nothing major like in Brasil.
When the local language is mixed in, it becomes really hard to understand.
Asia: usually don’t hear a lot from here but it seems to be like in Africa.
Not European, but I watched a video where Game Freak had the wrong Spanish language when they sent out their games worldwide. The thing is, Latin American Spanish is different to European Spanish language. This was at some point bad because I think a LATAM group sent Game Freak an email to complain about this issue, but GF responded with an automated message.
[The video I am talking about.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZFjRLAQ0h4)
Not a lot of difference between Russia Russian and Kazakhstani Russian language. Although some minor differences “На Украине (Russia)” “В Украине (Kazakhstan)”
Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch (the German language that some Amish speak) sounds like a weird mixture of bavarian Dialects, swabian Dialects, Swiss German and Dutch. Actually it does not only sound like that, that is what it is. Germans from all these regions came to America, lived together and their dialects adjustet until it became one thing.
There is also Pennsylvaniahochdeutsch. This is the “High German” version, so the non-dialect version and it’s crazy there still is a small group of Amish that speak like that. It is the closest thing to 18th/19th century German that is still spoken anywhere in the world. There are some elements specific too Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch and some english elements to it. The Amish are like a time capsule for German languages.
When I first learned about this and it being called “Pennsilvania Dutch” in english, I also learned that the Dutch are called the Dutch in english bc the English couldn’t pronounce “Deitsch”(German) and just lumped it all together. So in English the Dutch are called “Germans” and I find that hilarious.
Finnish isn’t really spoken outside of Finland. There used to be [American Finnish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Finnish) variant back when migration to America was a huge thing but modern-day Finnish Americans speak English just like any other people in the US. American Finnish evolved when Finnish lacked words for some things that existed in the US (car, for example) so they used English loanwords.
[Lännen lokari](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P59U0jFMxxo) is a song that uses some American Finnish words. Lokari, for example, comes from word logger (standard Finnish word for that would be metsuri).
we got big polish diaspora in Argentina/Brazil that emigrated there way back during napoleonic wars and pre ww1. They were isolated from new polish culture and therefore use outdated lang. It’s still very much understandable, though gives time traveling vibes. In last couple of years couple of popular traveling vloggers visited those regions and it became a small sensation
The only thing that can be called «colonial Catalan» is the Catalan as spoken in l’Alguer, a city in Sardinia. In the 14th century there was a revolt and the villagers killed the Catalan garrison soldiers. In revenge the Catalans expelled the villagers, some were send as slaves to Catalonia and Aragon and the population was replaced by Catalans, Majorcans and Valencians. And, well, to this day they speak Catalan.
Their Catalan has lots of influences from Sardinian and, lately, from Italian. Specially the prosody. Also they mix up the sounds of /r/ and /l/, so instead of blanca (white, in femenine) they might say «branca» (branch). And also the opposite, instead of portal (same as in English) they might say poltal. Hell, the nickname for l’Alguer is Barceloneta (little Barcelona) and they pronounce it Balceroneta, switching the r and the l! ;-D
Brazilian Portuguese’s accent is so different from Portuguese Portuguese that Brazilians don’t understand us. A few words change and the grammar also a bit. The reason is that Brazik got its independence on the 18th century if I’m not mistaken. For that reason they developed the language by themselves for a long time.
African ex-colonies have independence since the 70s so the grammar is closer and the accent also. There are a lot of different words, specially slang, due to creole but Portuguese itself sounds more similar to us than Brazilian Portuguese.
Perspective of someone who is both Portuguese and Scottish here: I think the differences between the variants of the Portuguese language are more pronounced than those of the English language.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t clear differences between all the different variants of English, but when it comes to written language, if we remove slang, certain words and spellings, then it’s actually hard to tell where someone is from (or at least for me it is). I often read articles in English and am not able to tell where the author is from (although spelling can sometimes give it away), whereas in Portuguese I can usually tell straight away if the person who wrote the text is from Portugal or Brazil.
There are a lot more words and terms unique to each variant, and the sentence structure is noticeably different at times. Examples:
– The verb “to plan” is “planear” in European Portuguese, and “planejar” in Brazilian Portuguese.
– The word “application” (as in an app) is “aplicação” in European Portuguese, and “aplicativo” in Brazilian Portuguese.
– The order in which the 1st person singular pronoun comes. In European Portuguese it’s usually after the verb, whereas in Brazilian Portuguese it comes before it. “I love you” in the former is “Amo-te”, and in the later “Te amo”.
– The use of “this” and “that”. Say you’re reading an article about a book, in European Portuguese the author would say “this book” (“este livro”), whereas in Brazilian Portuguese the it would be “that book” (“esse livro”).
– The 2nd person pronoun. In European Portuguese it’s “Tu”, whereas in Brazilian Portuguese it’s “Você”. I should note that “Tu” is only used in European Portuguese if you’re familiar with the person, as it’s a more personal and informal way of saying “you”. I’m also aware that in some places in Brazil they use “Tu” instead of “Você”.
Those are just some examples. Obviously if you’re taking slang into account the differences are even larger. I follow some Brazilian meme pages and sometimes struggle to understand what’s written. And I know that this also happens in the case of English. One need only take a look at Scottish Twitter, which I bet plenty of non-Scots have trouble understanding.
Well, it’s not colonial in any sense, but there are communities of Icelandic speakers in both Canada and the USA, collectively referred to as *Western Icelanders*. Most of them are descended from people who emigrated from the homeland, starting in the 1870s and stretching into the 20th century. The biggest communities are in Gimli (Manitoba, Canada) and Washington Island (Wisconsin, USA).
While I haven’t spoken in Icelandic with anyone from either of those communities, I have had conversations with people from the smaller and more dispersed Western-Icelandic community in North Dakota who were bilingual in Icelandic and English. Most of them were of retirement age (this was 20 years ago, so many, if not most, of them have presumably passed on by now) and the next generation generally didn’t speak Icelandic, or only spoke it a little or understood it some, but not well. There are probably exceptions, but I didn’t meet any. The generation after that (people now in middle age, but who were young at the time I visited) generally doesn’t speak it at all, but knows some words and takes pride in its Icelandic ancestry.
What I found was generally beautifully spoken and natively accented – albeit sometimes hesitant, as some hadn’t spoken it in a long time – Icelandic, with a somewhat old-fashioned vocabulary and inserting English words for things that were unknown or uncommon in Iceland when their ancestors emigrated. I had no problem understanding any of them.
The closest to “colonial Slovak” would be the Vojvodina dialect of Slovak in northern Serbia. I have no idea what it’s like though.
Talian from Brazil is definitely understandable by an Italian, and it’s mostly derived from Venetian with a bit of other local languages from Italy and Brazilian Portuguese. Even the sound and rythm will feel familiar for a Northern Italian.
UK English and US English have some subtle spelling difference. Chiefly, the UK suffixes -our and -ise are spelled -or and -ize in US English. Examples:
* Saviour (UK), savior (US)
* Colour (UK), color (US)
* Capitalise (UK), capitalize (US)
Only US English appears to have that distinction, as I believe all other English speaking countries follow UK spelling. There are a lot of colloquial terms that are different as well. Brits refer to space in the back of the car a “boot”, while Americans call it a “trunk”, “nappies” are “diapers”, “toilets” are “bathrooms” (regardless of whether or not there is a bath in that room).
Canadian English is sort of a hybrid of the two. They follow British spelling, but their colloquialisms are much closer to US English.
As an interesting aside, I’m an American, but I lived in the UK for three years, and while most native speakers instantly recognized me as being from abroad, most non-native speakers assumed I was British. I thought that was really interesting, as, to me, the two accents are not even remotely similar.
French has many variations in different countries.
French from Quebec is very different when spoke casually, both words and accent are different, making it hardly understandable and sounds almost like another language. However formally it is very understandable. Funnily singers from Quebec don’t have any accent when singing.
French from Africa is different mainly because of accent and pronounciation. African people have sometimes the tendency to do long and complex sentences in french or to use words we barely use in France.
There’s also variations for French people living in tropical islands, they have a typical accent where the ‘R’ is not as brutal as in current french. They also have creole language which is a mix of french and any other language that was common there.
Not colonial, but there’s this polish village in Turkey called Adampol, and people living there speak polish from 18th century 🙂
Indians sometimes use older words that have fallen out of use elsewhere. Like they say “Britisher” which was common in English once upon a time but is only really retained in Indian English.
Québec french is very understandable overall, but has a different accent, and very different expressions. In fact, many words and expressions in informal speech mean different things, and it’s not rare to joke about it. As an example, “gosse” is slang for kid in metropolitan french, but it means “testicle” in québecois.
Cajun french is harder to understand, but with a bit of effort you get it. Knowing english helps, as it borrows a lot from english in terms of grammar. I’m not sure cajun native speakers understand french well though.
“african” french is mostly an accent, they were colonized way later so the language had less time to evolve on its own. You can understand it pretty well.
EDIT : oh, and it may be worth mentioning that during the colonial french africa period, one army dude thought it was a good thing to create a “simpler” french for africans to learn. Understand : “a french that even they can speak”. It thankfully never took off, but it essentially would work like this : to say “I want to eat fries and go to bed early”, one would say “me want eat fries and go bed early”. There are some “simplifications” I cannot transcribe in english, but you don’t conjugate the verbs at all, among other things.
As far as I’m aware there aren’t really any “foreign” dialects of Irish amongst the speakers in other countries: most seem to either learn *An Caighdeán Oifigiúil* (the “Official Standard”), or whatever hodgepodge of dialects the course they’re learning from uses, or if their parents are native speakers they learn the same dialect they use.
If we want to get spicy and describe the Manx and Gaelic languages as “colonial dialects” of Irish, then the mutual intelligibility drops off a bit, especially with Gaelic pronounciation, but bringing it up here at all is just bait…
Poland: I often don’t understand people from Śląsk when they speak polish.
Patatonia Welsh, spoken in Y Wladfa, Argentina, has a reputation as sounding more traditional/ old fashioned than Welsh dialects spoken in Wales. As well as this there is a significant Spanish influence in terms of the vocabulary, accent and pronunciation, which is (obviously) not present in dialects in Wales.
For example
English: to go for a walk – Welsh (Wales): mynd am dro – Welsh (Patagonia): mynd i baseando (from the Spanish paseando)
English: come in! – Welsh (Wales): Dewch i mewn! – Welsh (Patagonia) Pasiwch! (a “Welshified” version of the Spanish pase!)
Not European, but I’ll scour YouTube for videos of this, and read the comment section. This subject is really interesting to me.
The videos on Texas German has gotten quite popular in Germany. There doesn’t seem to be a consensus on it. [Some Texans will have no foreign accent at all](https://youtu.be/Hdz_QETmnzo), according to Germans. [Most will have some](https://youtu.be/1_dH403pqRU). Almost all think (based on comments) that it’s completely intelligible, often times Dutch and South Africans have claimed Texas German to be easier to understand. Where there is a little bickering is where their accent comes from, some claim it’s just American, others swear it’s a mix.
The Cajuns in Louisiana and Texas are not actually from France. They are from New Brunswick in Canada, which already has a weird dialect. The general consensus, as [France 24 has done multiple pieces on it](https://youtu.be/aZFCbO5DsWQ), is a lot of Franco-Nationalism and Vive le Français shit — from Quebec, New Brunswick, and Europe (mainly France). But also, digging into it, you’ll see that they don’t really understand much of the Cadien French at all — not without subtitles. The Canadians do better at understanding them, perhaps unsurprisingly so.
MORE INTERESTINGLY, [New Mexican Spanish](https://youtu.be/rdAGJz4NvAg) to me (as someone who grew up speaking Spanish) sounds like someone with a pretty normal Northern Mexican accent. Some terms they use are weird, and are definitely archaic. But Spaniards seem to claim it sounds more Spanish. The comment section to the video is full of Spaniards and Mexicans bickering about how the other is wrong.
Denmark’s colonies were generally taken over by others, so we don’t have something like Afrikaans out there. We do, however, have some influence in northern England, for example, where there were a lot of settlers. You can find words closer to Danish there, than are used in normal English (for example kirk instead of church, which comes from kirke). I also think the Gaellic Tráill stems from træld (meaning slave).
I do know of some communities in the US that also try keeping an identity around Danish settlers. I remember seeing a little documentary about a Danish village somewhere in the US (I think it was called something with “horn” but I don’t remember). They showed some people trying to keep that Danish heritage alive with using cousine and so on. They also found someone who, allegedly, spoke Danish, but I honestly didn’t get much of what they said. It was kinda nice to see, but also tragic to see how they thought some things were really authentic, but actually aren’t.
Lastly, we do have some minorities living in Germany, and their Danish (assuming they bother learning it) is pretty solid, although obviously with a northern German accent or close to some Jutish dialects
Americans mangle spoken English just as much as other languages.
French spoken in Canada has a very different accent than French spoken in Europe but once you move past it, it’s pretty much the same language, idioms are different, there may be some changes in grammar and vocabulary but nothing too drastic for it to be considered a separate language.
I’m pretty sure that any Canadian that speak french can easily understand european French, and most French people would be able to understand Canadian french after a little bit of exposure to the pronunciation/accent.
French spoken in Louisiana sounds to me like if someone from the USA had learnt french on its own but with very old books : It’s not that different as in it’s definitely easily understandable but you have more changes in vocabulary/grammar than in Canadian french and the speakers seems more “laid back”, say more often use “tu” (informal you) than “vous” (formal you) for example.
English is not spelt the same everywhere. There’s a reason why US and the UK ‘are divided by a common language’, as the saying goes! In general, the Brits don’t mind the main colonial version of English 😉
Spaniard here, and let me tell you that Latin American Spanish is so vastly different that its insane. Mostly around slang words and nouns. We can clearly and perfectly talk to eachother, but say two words differently and we dont know whether you want to grab something or fuck it.
Omg it is so annoying that when you look up a Dutch town there are 245 American towns named the same. Recently I went to school in a wayyy to summer-y outfit because my weather app used Groningen, Surinam.
We only have a few of those the other way around, like a tiny village called Amerika. But a lot of our town names are very old and usually are named after the environment.
With close languages it is often easier to read them than to listen, when you read it you can recognise words. With Afrikaans it differs, sometimes it sounds like someone speaking Dutch very badly and sometimes it is a completely different language.
Working in an international environment, I’m forever having to code-switch between my native Standard Scottish English and a kind of simplified, standardised International Professional English.
English is just wild if you include [creoles and pidgins](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm_I4SvvK7I)