I’ve lived in Scotland and England so I can recognise a few different accents, but it occured to me that a lot of countries maybe don’t have such a difference in accents.

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46 comments

  1. The dialects here are very different. I speak in a very strong Bavarian dialect naturally and people from far away often don’t understand me at all unless I switch to Standard German.

  3. >In your country, are there accents that are this divergent?

    Wouldn’t say so, though there’s a big difference between northern spanish dialects and southern ones.

    Southern dialects tend to vocalize less. Sometimes It’s hard to get them.

    Sometimes It’s near imposible…https://youtu.be/Sbda9ENpmXg

    One of the issues about comparing dialects and accents IS that each country has a different take on what constitutes a dialect or accent.

    In Italy for example almost everything counts as an “italian dialect”. Calabrian and piedmontese could perfectly be different languages.

    Meanwhile Spain tends to count everything as a different language. Galician and portuguese are so close that in Italy they’d be considered accents.

    Edit: actually YES! There are dialects that distinct in Spain, though not castillian accents. Basque dialects are notably distinct and some experts say they very well could be different languages.

  4. I would say that the diversity of accents in Italy is even greater than in the UK. This is expecially true with older generations. Many of these accents (dialects would be a better term) are not at all understandable by other Italians. This is not suprising since Italians started speaking standard Italian only recently (the proliferation of television in post ww2 being one of the main drivers)

    Even today many people speak Italian and their own regional dialect which in some cases is very different

  5. There are many distinguishable accents in France. Marseille, Paris, Lille, Toulouse, Lyon, Montpellier… All of those I can recognize. Some are obviously closer because they come from almost the same places. Like the accent from the North (Lille and its region) called chtimi, and the picard accent coming from Picardie.

    In France, Tours is supposed to be the town with the most neutral accent.

  7. Yes, someone speaking a rural southern Swedish dialect will probably not understand someone speaking a rural northern dialect if they’re hardcore enough. I had a university pal from Scania whose girlfriend was from Skellefteå, a northern town, and he couldn’t understand her dad. Younger people, who’ve been subjected to “standard Swedish” mostly through TV can probably “clean up” their dialect enough to make themselves understood to almost anyone (“half Danes” might be excluded from this statement).

  8. I remember reading somewhere that Eastern Finnish dialects have more similarities with [Karelian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelian_language) than they do with Southwest Finnish dialects.

    Nowadays not many people speak in such strong dialects anymore and most who do are old people. Of course there is some regional variation but not in a way that I, as a Helsinkian wouldn’t be able to understand.

  9. In Romania there are some regional words/slag that may vary, and a slight accent in certain areas but nothing drastic. We even understand the people from the Republic of Moldova which, despite being a different country, speak the exact same language and just have a bit of a Slavic accent.

  10. No, almost everyone speaks standard Polish, with a few exceptions.

    There is Kashubian, which is a separate language, Silesian, of which the speakers often want it classified as a separate language and Goral (highlander) speech which is quite similar to Slovak.

    People who speak with these accents/dialects/languages can (and do) generally just speak standard Polish too, though, maybe besides the highlanders.

  11. In Romania we have three sub-dialects (Transylvanian, Southerner, Moldovan) with some different words and a different accent.

  12. Norway has a myriad of diverse dialects throughout the country. Some are as different from standard (Oslo) Norwegian as Danish, Swedish or Faroese, while most are more subtle. A few dialects are broadly considered nearly impossible to understand. Each region of Norway have a distinct dialect, accent and their set of special words and expressions. It can be very easy to hear where people come from. Differences can traditionally shift from hamlet to hamlet and fjord to fjord. There were more dialects and diversity before and dialects disappear or smooth out over time. Languages change over time. As an example you could travel barely 15 minutes from one village to another in the countryside outside of Oslo before and experience two different dialects. Where as you today will only hear one of them or a more alike standard Oslo Norwegian with a few hints of the old.

  13. Sure. Try to have someone from the very north speak with someone from the southern coast. They can barely communicate without standard language. And there are hundreds of microregional idioms where pretty much each village has their own dialect.

  14. Not even close. Most Latvian speakers speak standard Latvian, with maybe a few regional words, and each generation speaks increasingly standard. Dialects, to the extent they still exist, are considered inappropriate for most situations and speaking in a clearly regional accent will also lead to you being judged, that’s now mostly left to old rural people.

    In the case of Latvia, I think the strong tendency toward the standard language is both due to official policy and geographic factors.

  15. Proper Bornholmsk as spoken on Bornholm or Sønderjysk as spoken in Sønderjylland is very distinct from what is spoken in Copenhagen or Aarhus.

    These day most of these have/are dying out because the young people are converging towards Rigsdansk

  16. Some of the rural Jutish dialects can be very different to a point that speakers of standard Danish (rigsdansk) can’t keep up. But Jutland has a lot of variation, with some being easier to understand than others. Fun fact, some Jutes can hear a difference on a village to village basis.

    Bornholm is also home to a dialect that can at times require a little extra concentration. The dialects on Funen are pretty straightforward, and same goes for Zealand (which are basically just minor accent differences at this point)

  17. Apart from the four languages that are spoken in Switzerland, you will find various dialects.

    For example the German spoken in Bern sounds different from the German spoken in Zurich. (Though technically both have alemannic roots)

  18. According to one of my former linguistics professors, Switzerland is one of the most diverse places in Europe in this regard (highest diversity of dialects relative to the geographic size of the country). A lot of this is due to the topography of our country. Of course there are all the mountains but we also have a wealth of rivers and lakes. For centuries, these features of our landscape served as natural boundaries. Especially in Cantons such as Grisons, Wallis, Bern, Uri, Schwyz, Nidwalden, Obwalden, Glarus and Lucerne, many communities were exceptionally isolated; in some cases up until the 1960s and 1970s.

    The Swiss dialects belong to the Alemannic language family but there are three different sub-groups of this family that can be found here: low Alemannic, high Alemannic and highest Alemannic. Low Alemannic is mostly spoken in southern Germany but there are also some examples in Switzerland, such as the dialects spoken in Basel and Schaffhausen (both of which are located adjacent to the German border). The majority of Swiss dialects belong to the sub-group of high Alemannic. Examples would be the dialects spoken in Zurich or Bern. Highest Alemannic is most widespread in the Alpine Cantons, such as Wallis, Grisons, parts of rural (alpine) Bern as well as many of the Cantons of Central Switzerland.

    The difference between low Alemannic and highest Alemannic is quite significant. Although these dialects are usually mutually intelligible, misunderstandings definitely do occur on occasion. Due to their century-long isolation, highest Alemannic dialects are extremely conservative. In many ways, they reflect German (or Swiss) the way it was spoken 600-700 years ago. Anyone who knows Middle High German will notice the striking similarity in the phonology of highest Alemannic. Various vowel shifts that have occurred in German and in other Alemannic dialects did not occur in these Alpine dialects. Just to give one example, many Central Swiss dialects use an “iu”-diphthong sound where other Swiss dialects use a long “ü”-monothong. So, the English word “people” is “Lüüt” in Zurich but “Liud” in the Cantons of Glarus or Uri. In German it’s “Leute”. However, in Middle High German, it was “Liude”, in Old High German “Liudi”. So on this language continuum, High German has gone through the most linguistic change, followed by Alemannic dialects in Switzerland, followed by highest Alemannic, which has in many ways remained a direct window to the past. Also in terms of vocabulary, there are some interesting clues. For example in rural, Alpine Bern and also in the Canton of Wallis, some people say “ham” or “hammä” for ham. The word used in English and the ones used in these highest Alemannic dialects are directly related cognates that go back to a much older, common parent. In the rest of Switzerland and in Germany, the word “ham” has been displaced by “Schinken”.

    Another thing that characterizes the diversity of Swiss dialects is that they have different grammars. For example sentence structure, past participles and plural forms are often different depending on where you go in Switzerland.

    One very important factor that differentiates Swiss from practically all other languages in Europe is that it was never given a standard. In regard to dialect diversity, this is a great thing. Standards usually have the effect of “flattening” the linguistic landscape and displacing more regional variants. Since we never established a standard in Switzerland, regional and rare variants did not experience this pressure. Moreover, Swiss people traditionally have a very favorable attitude toward dialect diversity. This is not the case in countries such as Germany, where talking in your local dialect will often be associated with negative stereotypes (being uneducated etc.) and people therefore feel pressured to use the standard version.

  19. I have difficulty understanding people living 50km away. Even though Flanders is really small, the way of talking can be so different between two people living only 25km away

  20. The accents in Ireland vary wildly from north to south, east to west. However, even within localities, there can be differences. My grandparents grew up 20 kilometres apart but have noticeably different accents and dialects – one influenced by native Irish and one influenced by the Scottish planters.

  21. Within Austria it is mostly okay until you get to Vorarlberg. I don’t know much about that dialect though so I can’t say for sure how much I understand when they just talk like they usually do. Probably not that much. With the other german speaking countries it is much more difficult. My husband is from Saxony and to this day my in laws don’t understand when I speak a bit faster, like I do at home. Swiss German or low German is almost like a different language (I know low German kind of is).

  22. West-Flemish and everything.

    While dialects *do* exist in Wallonia, much of it has been supplanted by French with local accents, so you might have an old *mamie* from Liège who speaks with a strong Liège accent and throws in a hell of a lot of Walloon words.

  23. Denmark has had a strong centralised government for a long time. Part of this proces was establishing a national Scholl system. Part of this curriculum was how to be a proper Dane. Before the turn of the 20th century there were many local dialects. If you were from some parts of Jutland your dialect was part of language continuum that was mutualy intelligible with various German dialects. Nowadays all of these dialects are gone.

    So no, there aren’t really many dialects in Denmark, and contrary to what Danes may say, they aren’t terribly distinct either.

    In some areas there are of course notable accents, such as the West coast of Jutland or on the islands. A notable example could be Bornholm placed far from mainland Denmark. The only place that still has a pronounced dialect that could be hard to understand would be lower Jutland. The area is the borderlands between Denmark and Germany. The region was also part of Germany for a long time, which may be part of the reason they still have a regional dialect.

    There are German speakers in Denmark though, and I presume that much like the Danish speakers in Germany, they have an accent distinct from other Danish accents.

  24. For the Irish language there are three major dialect groups, Ulster (north), Connacht (west) and Munster (south). They’re all pretty divergent from one another in all sorts of ways, syntax, phonology, vocabulary. Although because all three major dialects are heard on the radio and TV, proficient speakers usually don’t have too much trouble understanding each other.

    Arguably an even bigger chasm is now opening between Gaeltacht speakers (i.e. people from areas where Irish has traditionally continuously been spoken) and “new” or “urban” Irish speakers, whose dialects are much more influenced by English. I’d say that most confusion and unintelligibility happens along this axis these days rather then amongst Gaeltacht speakers.

  25. A lot of people in Scotland speak Scots , which is a separate language and can get mistaken for an accent or dialect of English

  26. In Slovakia there a few main accent varieties.

    * The area near Czech border has a dialect which is very similar to Czech.
    * The whole south of Slovakia is essentially a Hungarian-speaking region. The ethnic Hungarians tend to have a strong accent in Slovak as it’s not their native language (and this of course varies but stereotypically also bad grammar).
    * Eastern Slovakia has a typical accent and also a dialect which can be hard to understand for some people who are not exposed to it.
    * The regions near Ukrainian border speak Rusyn language (but most also know standard Slovak) which is an East Slavic language closer to Ukrainian.
    * Central Slovakia is considered to have the “purest” form of the language.
    * Bratislava, the capital, has an accent which has harder pronunciation and omits the softening accent on some letters (for example soft “L” like in **Lj**ubljana) is pronounced as normal L in Bratislava.

  27. Not really. There are a lot of distinct dialects in Sweden, but I’ve never had much trouble understanding any of them.

    Of course [Elfdalian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfdalian) is an exception, but that’s because it’s really a different language even though the Swedish government counts it as a dialect. It is less similar to Swedish than Norwegian and Danish are.

  28. Even inside the Andalusian Spanish there are so many variations that you can usually pinpoint where a person was raised sometimes up to the city.

  29. Well if we talk only about Serbia, then the difference between the southeast and everywhere else is very pronounced. They speak the non-standard torlakian dialect, while the rest of the country speaks the standard štokavian. But if we count the whole serbocroatian speaking area, the difference between torlakian and kajkavian (spoken in the northwest of Croatia), or torlakian and čakavian (spoken on the west coast of Croatia) is massive

  30. Regional languages have seeped heavily in accents. Even if relatively few people (but still a lot) speak their regional language on a day to day basis, they have a more or less strong accent when speaking Standard Italian. Mostly everyone used regional languages alongside Italian a few decades ago, and for the lower classes Standard Italian was effectively a foreign language.

    This is a good overview of what many regional languages sound like: https://youtu.be/_VFV5D1JLAM?t=95 – mostly regional languages, some gibberish, some Italian with thick regional accents.

  31. Dialects are becoming less widely used in the Netherlands, but if someone from Limburg in the south and Groningen in the north spoke their dialect they couldn’t understand each other. And someone from the west would understand neither.

    Friesland in the north has their own official language, not mutually understandable.

  32. As an Austrian German i once was in Hamburg (northern Germany) with a friend. We were at the checkout of a supermarket and were talking about something in our dialect. The guy assumed we didn’t talk german and talked to us in English which was really funny at that moment. I don’t even have a strong accent i feel like dialects are slowly dying due to german media in Austria, which I find kinda sad as it’s part of our culture.

  34. Yes, in the Netherlands every region has its own dialect and accent, but mostly older people speak the dialects. I can speak the local dialect of Gronings, but I only use it in conversations with people over 50 years old. I do speak with a little accent sometimes, which gets noticed in other parts of the country. When I spoke Dutch in Belgium, someone asked where the hell I came from, because he never heard this accent before. That really shows some diversity in the Dutch accents

  35. Southern France is notorious for having some typical accents in some regions. There are soft accents in the north and Alsace-Lorraine. Where I am from, Brittany, we have the very same sounding as in Paris. But truth be told, the standardised french pronunciation, aka parisian french, is overall hegemonic in most part of the country.

  36. There are a bunch of dialects within 150km of my home that I can’t really understand.

    Our dialects are so diverse and distinct, that people can pin point the town you grew up in just by hearing you talk a few sentences.

  37. Interesting things about German dialects/accents and the Standard/High German confusion. Sorry it got a bit long.

    Germans don’t use accent (the way the British tend to ) to mean the colour in the language of of someone speaking the standard form of the language but with a range of phonetic differences.

    For Germans, “Akzent” is the colouring of someone speaking a foreign language.

    One reason for this is that Germany has a range of dialects that are far stronger than most things that exist in the UK. All the UK “accents” are basically comprehensible, with very occasional exceptions – and in those cases, we sometimes speak of dialects (sometimes though we just call it “a very strong accent” and sometimes, certainly in the case of Scotland, the line between accent, dialect and “it’s a separate language” is unclear).

    To answer the original question – many Germans are basically code switchers – similar to someone who speaks broad Scots in their everyday life, but speaks “standard English” (albeit with a Scottish accent) when required.

    Now the interesting bit: the exceptions to these are basically some of the southern dialects (especially Bavarian, also some other dialects like Swabian), and the reason why the people in southern Germany are more likely to only speak their dialects and to have trouble with standard German is tied up with the history of the standard version of the language itself.

    The thing is, Hochdeutsch means two things: standard German and high German. How can that be? It seems absurd, especially since the high German speakers (those in the south, where it is mountainous) are notoriously bad at speaking standard German!

    Well the basic reason (simplified version) is that the standard German that emerged for the whole German speaking world in the renaissance and reformation period as a written language (based crucially on Luther’s translation of the bible) was a variety of High German. And the reason that High German became synonymous with Standard German is that the northern parts of the country, including Prussia, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Low Saxony, Holstein, much or most of Westphalia, without trying to be too precise, basically the northern half, traditionally spoke Low German. Low German, which is the basis of the remaining dialects in places like Hamburg, Berlin and the Ruhr, is now almost moribund – I have compared the status to that of Scots, because the comparison is fairly clear: a smaller cousin, overwhelmed by a larger relative and not promoted in school systems, remaining rural, and used mostly by poets. (The major difference being that Scots has always the potential to be seen as / become a national language).

    So standard German, based largely on Luther’s High German and spreading via the printing presses simply knocked out Low German. Therefore, if you lived in the North, you were very aware of the difference between the Low German (normally known as Platt) you spoke at home, and the High German you learned at school. High German thus became the name for standard German for most people.

    In the south, by contrast, there was no need to adapt your dialect so completely. So you could continue speaking Bavarian or Swabian, and be more or less comprehensible. Because while someone speaking Platt would be entirely incomprehensible, someone speaking Bavarian is just about able to make themselves understood.

    Today, of course, the result is that the southern Germans who continue to speak their High German dialects deviate more from the standard German than the northern Germans who learned Hochdeutsch as a foreign language and largely dropped their Low German over centuries. And the ultimate irony is that the place where High German is now considered to be the purest is Hannover, in Lower Saxony, where the original language was actually Low German and High German was an import.

  39. If you consider that people in south of Sweden have a dialect close to Danish and that Danish is not a language but a speech disorder they are hard to understand. North Swedish dialect is not that far off from other dialects.

    Also my cousins from Esbjerg in South of Denmark speak something that has no resemblance to the Danish in Copenhagen. So imagine my cousins that already have the Danish speech disorder thing and on top of that are trying to be Germans when they speak. It sounds like they are throwing up when they talk. So both Sweden and Denmark has this problem but it is all Denmarks fault. To solve this we should just introduce Swedish as the main language in Denmark. If we do that then Danish children will also manage to understand their parents at an earlier stage in life.

  40. Uuuhhh… in the north they speak turkish, in the south they speak greek. Does that count?

    As for the south, we speak cypriot-greek, wich is a dialect in itself (some people even say it’s a different language*), and there are also regional accents in the different districts, wich are distinct enough but they are not THAT different.

    *I would say the difference between cypriot-greek and standard greek is the same as swiss-german and german (hochdeutsch)

  41. In my country, no. Belgian accents (in french at least idk about the dutch part) are, sure quite ugly and sound funny, but they are all understandable.
    In other french speaking countries tho… ok actually only one of them which is Canada. Quebecers, we love you but we dont get a word of what you say if you dont speak slow enough.

  42. In Canada, probably some of the most different accents (while still speaking English), is probably our east coast . . . . . Newfoundland (Newfies), Nova Scotia (Blue Nosers), and New Brunswick (Herring Chokers) LOL. I am a newfie and when two of us get talking it’s another world.

  43. Yes, the furthest away you get from the centre (Athens), the more divergence you will encounter, such as Crete and Cyprus, and Northern Epirus.

  44. Lol, in austria every valley has their own dialect. People from Vorarlberg speak complete gibberish

  45. The difference between Sicilian and Friulian is the same (if not more) than the difference between Italian and any other romance language.

    It’s not only accents, they’re totally different languages.

  46. Almost everyone in cities speak modern standard Turkish (İstanbul Turkish), yet people from rular areas can have very heavy accents and local words. It can cause funny moments when a fisher from Black Sea uses a swear word casually to describe bad fish while people from İstanbul try understand why he is cussing to fish.

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