What’s the most rural dialect in your country?

9 comments

1. I don’t know if other will agree, but I would say that the dialect of the uppermost part of the Savinja valley is the most rural one.

   As for the least understandable one it is definetly Prekmurje dialect.

2. I would probably say Sardinian..it has a kind of stereotypical image of a place with lots of villages and sheep.

   But it doesn’t really work like that in Italy.Every region has its dialects and then within regions there are even more dialects, it’s very complex!

   In Sicily for example there are lots of different words used in different parts of the region, and also different accents…rather than a real difference between urban and rural areas.

   If you are from outside you probably wouldn’t notice much of this, but living here…I can tell where someone is from, which province in Sicily and maybe even narrow it down from there.

   OTOH I couldn’t tell the difference between someone who lived in Verona and one who was from Venice.But they could…

3. I think I’ve touched on this before, and maybe it’s regional, but I’d say it depends on the farmer archetype.

   E.g.
   The plump, jolly farmer speaks Scanian
   The emaciated farmer with one cow and a stony field speaks Småländska
   The moonshine-making farmer speaks Halländska
   The a-bit-of-everything-above farmer speaks Västgötska

4. Having the spectacular array of dialects that we do, there are several contenders. I think the clear winner would be the dialects from the Toten area in the traditional county of Oppland, which are most likely to be used in commercials featuring agricultural products. Dialects from rural Trøndelag and the Setesdal area are other good candidates. Since you’re also interested in incomprehensibility: Toten dialects aren’t very hard to understand for most outsiders as far as dialects go; Trøndelag areas can get quite difficult, while Setesdal dialects can sound downright archaic.

5. In the country it’s probably Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg, some, especially the older folk there has a very stereotyphical “rural” dialect. But the most rural sounding hungarian is spoken by the székelys probably.

6. I’m not sure if we’ve really got one, our dialects are more of a regional thing so you’ll find that people in rural areas speak broadly similar to people in the nearest town, there’s no real difference between how I speak to how people in nearby rural villages do.

7. Depends a bit on what you consider a dialect. Because my pick would be Low Saxon but that’s classified as a separate language these days. Or more generally just the accent that people from the east use.

8. Polish doesn’t really have that many dialects nowadays, but one speech pattern that is commonly associated with rural people is adding „ł” before „o” that is at the start of the word. E.g: „Ło Boże!” instead of „O Boże” („Oh god!”).

9. Probably a dialect/accent from the South-West (also known as the Westcountry) or East Anglia. A cartoon stereotype of a farmer will usually be given this accent, and often accompanied with a sentence like “Ooh are, where’s moi maangel-wurrrzel”. Kind of the equivalent of a Southern redneck accent in the US.

   [Example](https://youtu.be/tb63PdPweDc)

   Many features of what we now associate with the Westcountry accent were actually more widespread all over rural Southern England until after WW2 when a lot of Londoners migrated/were resettled outside London. My uncle grew up in Chesham in Buckinghamshire (a town so close to London it’s actually on the Tube) in the 60s and still talks like this. Since then it’s slowly retreated westward and even in the South-West most younger educated people don’t talk like this, in part because of its association with [simple rural folk](https://youtu.be/0v546L0VIhg).

   And fun fact: the Westcountry never had much Norse settlement so the traditional dialects have very little of the Norse influence that Standard English has. So the verb “to be” would be conjugated as “I be, thou beest, he is” (cf German *Ich bin, du bist, er ist*, Swedish *jag är, du är, han är*) and “I’m not” would be “I bain’t”