I’m guessing that in smaller countries (eg Malta) there is no difference in accent from one town to the next.
How about in your country? Can you narrow a person down to a particular city or region,if they don’t tell you where they come from? How accurately?
Are there also particular words that a person from one region would use,that makes it obvious where they are from?
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Yes to all of the above. We have nine states, most people can usually determine which one of those someone is from by their dialect or accent. Sometimes it can get even more regional than that.
I’d say it’s really easy to say what region someone is from if they haven’t “sanded down” their regional accent. I may not know the exact town, but north, further north, south, west, “whine belt”, Dalarna etc… it’s distinct.
And words can be regional too. Whether you say “ostbågar” or “ostkrokar” (cheetos/cheese puffs) is a south/north thing and pronouncing “sh” sounds at the back of your throat or the front of your mouth is the quickest way to discern between northern or southern origin.
It is very easy to tell if someone is from the north, south, east or west of the country just by their accent. To know which particular region or city requires some knowledge of the local dialect.
At least concerning German-speaking Switzerland, you can distinguish very well from the dialect, from which region someone comes. Most people can assign the dialect to the cantons, which are basically only a few kilometers apart (speech melody, use of vowels, and vocabulary can differ significantly), and some practiced ears can tell quite precisely from which valley or village someone comes (depending on the region).
There are some regions of Poland with a distinctive accent, like east or far south, but mostly it’s a matter of using specific words. After WW2, we had a mass action of forced relocations (thank you, papa Stalin) so there are parts that don’t speak with any peculiarities anymore.
Quite easy for me to tell if someone is from northern Jutland, southern Jutland, Funen or Zealand
>How about in your country? Can you narrow a person down to a particular city or region,if they don’t tell you where they come from? How accurately?
Not at all, it’s just IMPOSSIBLE. If someone speaks Silesian, you know that they are from Silesia. If someone has the specific mountain accent, you know that they are from the Tatra mountains region. If someone has this specific way of speaking old people from Podlasie have, you can guess they’re from Podlasie. Other than that, nope. Just nope.
Polish is too homogenous to guess what city someone is from judging only by the way they speak. I studied in university in Warsaw, where I met people from all over Poland. No difference between them whatsoever when it comes to accent, the girl from Szczecin (north-west Poland) spoke exactly like the girl from Przemyśl (south-east Poland). The only people that stood out were two girls from Belarus but it’s just obvious. Before WW2 the differences were more significant but because of what had happened, it’s almost completely gone.
Which is ridiculous given the fact that in countries smaller than Poland (e.g. Switzerland) it’s more than obvious where someone is from judging by the way they speak.
>Are there also particular words that a person from one region would use,that makes it obvious where they are from?
Maybe, for example potato is in standard Polish *ziemniak*, but in Poznań it’s *pyra*. Or in Poznań the colloquial term for the police is *szkieły* instead of *psy*. But in my opinion if you don’t know the words you won’t guess where someone is from in Poland.
Yes, that’s definitely a thing. I even knew of a website once, where you could hear a sound clip of a dialect and had to put a marker on a map where exactly you think the person came from, geoguessr style. Sadly I can’t find it any more right now.
Accent so different it becomes a different language
>I’m guessing that in smaller countries (eg Malta) there is no difference in accent from one town to the next.
Well, in the past, some villages and towns were renowned for having their own accent, but the differences in accent across towns has diminished greatly due to the introduction of cars and TV.
Nowadays, the only region that has a noticeably different accent is Gozo. The Gozitans often replace certain vowels with other ones, creating a sort of effect called by the Maltese as “bl-imgħawweġ” (which translates to “with a bend”).
I am personally not great with accents or dialects, especially ones that sound somewhat similar, like Eastern and Northern Finnish dialects. And a lot of people’s accents and dialects have become milder thanks to TV and the internet.
I think very precisely. Specially southern accents.
You’d be surprised that even really small countries have big diversity in dialects. In Slovenia, with only 2 million inhabitants, there are over 40 different dialects. Each city, town or even a bigger village has its own dialect. If one is not able to pinpoint exact location by a dialect, he/she is certainly able to tell from which one of the seven major dialect regions speaker originates.
It depends really. Some accents are only identifiable over a broad region, some to a county or part of a county, some to a part of a particular city and some to within a couple of streets.
Very easy in Scotland. We have hundreds of accents in such a small country. The difference between a Glaswegian accent and Edinburgh accent is monumental – and they’re less than 50 miles apart. Not including all the accents in between
Pretty close. Obviously there’s exceptions but Ireland has notoriously diverse accents. You can usually pretty accurately say where someone’s from just on their accent
You should compare normal, idiomatic Finnish with the Savonian, Karelian, Laplandic, and Bothnian dialects.
Within Hungary, as the language was all but standardised in the 19th Century, I myself barely recognise any variants. There’s a strong accent in areas that were detached from Hungary after the Second World War, but I must admit I cannot differentiate them – though this is my shortcoming, I’m less informed about these variants and I know many people can quickly recognise them.
It’s pretty easy to tell where someone is from, and we can pretty much know which part of the country they’re from just by how they pronouce the word “I”, jeg, eg, æ, e, ei, etc. There’s a lot more than that but that’s generally how people roughly know which part of the country someone is.
I can say if someone is from Transilvania, Moldova if they speak faster and Oltenia. But the exact county it’s hard. The same goes for Muntenia region and Dobrogea. I can say from where they are because of the lack of accent but not the exact county
Very easy. I can even tell when they talk in English.
**Not everyone has an accent, but for those who do*, it’s quite easy as there’s an accent associated to each region, deriving from their individual old dialect really.
There are many words that are specific to some parts of France. There’s “Peuchère!” for example that comes to my mind. People in Provence tend to say it to express surprise/annoyance (I think?). In mine there’s “frare” meaning insolent.
Here is a [map](https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/dutch/files/2020/03/Dialecten_in_Nederland.jpg) of 26 dialects (and accents) of the Netherlands. Not all of them are that distinct from each other but people from neighbouring dialects seem to hear the differences.
EDIT: The regions with no dialects are reclaimed land areas. People live there but it’s to recent for them to have formed their own regional dialects. Though, that doesn’t mean that some people might yet speak dialects from neighbouring areas.
You can pretty much always narrow it down to the area they’re from within a region/county. If they’re from a city you could probably narrow it down to which part of the city as well, if the city is big enough.
In my area I can narrow it down to the village. The accent of the local dialect changes every few km in any direction.
Can tell apart maybe 4 or 5 different accents + 2 from the islands.
Funny that you used Malta as an example. I was immediately reminded of [this article](https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2013/11/martin-the-pigeon-man-homeless-on-the-streets-of-dublin-for-many-years-is-not-only-maltese-but-from-a-very-particular-social-background/) I read ages ago where someone from Malta recognised the accent of a homeless person in Dublin not only as Maltese, but could also narrow it down to a particular social group and thus, a very small group of possible families, just by his accent.
So small places can definitely also have a variety of accents!
Basically impossible. I might be able to tell if someone is from the countryside, but that’s all.
Ireland is very diverse in accents.
Theres regional ones that can be easily identified, most counties have their own accent, some have more than one (there’s 26/32 counties, depending on who you ask, but the same applies) and these would be similar accents across a big enough area.
Theres also differences between most towns or villages or areas in a city within the regional accents. For example, I’m my own county in the west Midlands (Roscommon), there’s about 60k people, and I can fairly easily notice the difference between North and south roscommon and most of the towns aswell.
In general it would be fairly easy to figure out what county someone was from if they had an accent and easy enough to know more local ones if you’re from the area.
Whereas I can’t pick up the regional accent that easily because of the exposure to it ever since I was born [people said to me I have a very Hungarian accent which makes me super self-conscious about it] there are some words and phrases that only people of **Transylvania**, and the ones close to the Hungarian border would use, borrowed words from the neighboring language and if they speak the language, then the grammatical structure as well. When it comes to other regions though, especially when it comes from someone from **Wallachia**, they use Present Perfect instead of Imperfect when talking in the past – it threw me off at first, haha~! **Moldova** has an interesting yet very specific accent, almost to the point everyone knows how a Moldavian sounds like.
It’s rather easy at a regional level since despite being a small country there are several different accents well demarked in the different regions of the country.
Well in Slovenia we have 7 main dialect groups which are further divided into more than 40 [subdialects](https://external-preview.redd.it/8zpCUsOIdradDOQ7MA3YWVnSUEm4GSOLTmNr_lynAck.jpg?auto=webp&s=40d67585d30b1a3e12fe6c3f505c363e17e2fb3f). You could easily tell from which part of the country a person is by just saying a few words. Most of the time, there are even differences within those subdialects. I live in a town that’s part of the South Pohorje dialectal group and I can easily tell from which village/town a person is.
Cork is easy, they’ll tell you before you can ask them :p