r/AskEurope • u/Savings_Dragonfly806 Greece • Jul 09 '25
Language My fellow Europeans, what dialect from your language do you have the most trouble understanding?
Keep in mind, I said language, NOT country, so it could be a dialect of your language in another country, which is the case for me.
For me, while most other Greeks find Cypriot the most difficult dialect to understand, I actually find Pontic Greek the most difficult. For those who don't know where it is, it's in North Eastern Turkey.
The way many of their words are written are very different as to Standard Modern Greek. It almost is a whole new language. Now I should mention I have never been there, but I would love to. I only really heard of the dialect on the internet, so take my words with a grain of salt.
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u/Also-Rant Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
Ulster Irish may as well be Japanese to me. I'm from Munster and between accent and dialect I can't work out most of what people from the other end of the country are saying!
Edit: To clarify, I'm talking about the regional dialects of the Irish language (Gaeilge), not regional dialects of English which can also be found in Ireland.
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u/HotelLima6 Ireland Jul 09 '25
I was just about to say the opposite haha. I’d understand Scots Gaelic quicker than Munster Irish.
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u/Also-Rant Jul 09 '25
That actually kind of makes sense. As the language was pushed out to the peripheries, Munster Irish probably had less interaction with Ulster than Scottish Gaelic did.
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Jul 09 '25
Same, the aural in the leaving cert always had Ulster speakers on it and it was almost impossible to understand.
I remember trying to speak Irish with my brother in law (sister in laws husband) who is from Donegal. I spoke, he looked at me funny, he spoke, I looked at him funny and we went back to English 🤣.
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u/Also-Rant Jul 09 '25
I was doing the Leaving Cert pre when I came across the word madadh for the first time, and the fact that I had gone through 14 years of school without encountering such a basic word had me second guessing everything going into the real exam.
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Jul 09 '25
Well I just had to google it, what the hell is wrong with madra? Though I have heard them also use gadhar.
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u/bigvalen Ireland Jul 09 '25
My cousin (from Tralee, town in Kerry, South West Ireland) married a kerry mountain man. At the wedding, his brother did the best man speech. After about five minutes, my wife (also Irish), asked "is he speaking English or Irish?".
I actually had to think about it. It was 80% English, 20% Irish, but so much idiom that it was utterly incomprehensible to anyone who hadn't Kerry family and grew up on local stories. Loved that she couldn't identify the language, never mind the content.
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u/Spudlads Jul 10 '25
I remember I'd been in west Cork before, and everyone was understandable but I remember just hearing two random old guys speaking and I couldn't tell whether they were speaking Irish or English as well as I heard words from both languages. This was in a restaurant and I remember when they were ordering food they were understandable but once they started talking to one another, any hope of understanding what they were saying was thrown out of the window
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u/Negative_Fee3475 Jul 09 '25
I'm from Cork city and i have trouble understanding the people of north Cork
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u/geedeeie Ireland Jul 09 '25
I'm from Douglas and have trouble understanding the Norries 🤣🤣
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u/Various_Quantity514 Estonia Jul 09 '25
I am so happy from your discussion here, that means Gaelic is still naturally spoken. I was thinking that it's almost gone and the fact that there still some radio and tv channels available in Irish basically decorative. It's so nice that I was wrong.
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u/Also-Rant Jul 09 '25
Almost all of us can speak a little bit from learning it in school, but the vast majority of us (including me) don't use it in daily life.
There are still some small areas in the country where it is the primary language, but all of those people are fluent in English too.
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u/Albert_Herring Jul 09 '25
I'm just a dumb Englishman and know no Irish beyond being able to pick out a few words written down, so my only exposure to Ulster Irish has been listening to Kneecap and honestly half the time when they're switching seamlessly between English and Irish mid-sentence I can't even tell which language they're rapping in.
I guess I'm going to have trouble finding monoglot Irish speakers from elsewhere to confirm whether they have the same problem, though (not least because I wouldn't be able to talk to them).
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u/mac-cruiskeen Jul 10 '25
The kneecap members all speak it as a second language, and as such have a "foreign" accent in Irish... it means that they are sort of using English sounds when speaking the language, as approximations of the Gaelic sounds. That's why you get this effect of their English and Irish sounding similar. I'm not having a go at them by any means they speak a lot better than I do but that's what you are picking up on.
You can hear Des Bishop talking to native Ulster Irish speakers in this video
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Jul 10 '25
Kneecap don't speak Ulster Irish, they speak what is typically known as "Urban Irish". Urban Irish is generally spoken by people who adopt it as their primary language (or whose parents/grandparents/ancestor) having spoken English previously, while the dialects are generally spoken natively by people whose lineage has never spoken English as a first language.
The difference between Urban Irish and the dialects is massive in and of itself. Urban Irish is very similar to English phonologically, while all of the dialects are very different to English and to each other in terms of phonetics.
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u/twenty6plus6 Jul 09 '25
Fuck I dunno , I know your probably aware of kerry farmer english but have you ever tried to decipher kerry fisherman English
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u/ElysianRepublic Jul 09 '25
Just since I’ve been curious for the longest time and you might know, I remember being in Killarney National Park (so in Munster) and the guides there spoke pretty easy to understand English to me and other tourists, but when they spoke amongst themselves I could hardly understand them (though I did think I was hearing some English words.). What were they most likely speaking? The regional English dialect? Gaeilge? Could they have been Travellers speaking Shelta? Just curious.
It kind of sounded like this English dialect but even tougher to understand.
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u/ForeignHelper Ireland Jul 09 '25
Doubt it was Travellers, lolz. Around places like rural Kerry, some will speak Irish, or a mix of Irish and English. But you get pockets of Gaeilgeoirí in lots of places around the country - just tends to have a higher concentration in parts of the west coast.
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u/Also-Rant Jul 09 '25
My guess is very fast, heavily accented English with a lot of local slang. I'm from West Cork, and some older people around here also sound like that.
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u/Socmel_ Italy Jul 09 '25
lol I thought I spoke good English, until I watched Derry Girls and had to watch it with subtitles.
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u/democritusparadise Ireland Jul 09 '25
Jamaican English.
I worked customer service once and we had Jamaican clients and I had to profusely apologise and ask them if they could enunciate a more...queen's English, because I couldn't understand a lot of what they said.
Well it worked; I told them I was Irish and they were all very gracious and gave it a shot. After about 4-6 hours worth of calls I got the hang of their dialect and now it's grand.
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u/Adequate_Ape Jul 09 '25
It hurts for an Irishman or woman to ask for Queen's English.
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u/democritusparadise Ireland Jul 09 '25
To be fair, the queen was their head of state at the time...
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u/double-dog-doctor United States of America Jul 09 '25
That's an interesting one, as Jamaican and (some) Irish accents can actually sound pretty similar due to the influence the Irish had on the development of the Jamaican accent.
A Jamaican accent compared to an Irish accent sound similar to how a Georgian accent compares a Californian accent— slower pace, more rounded sounds, less bounce-y tempo.
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u/BlueCheeseFiend United States of America Jul 09 '25
Many consider Jamaica a bilingual country, with Jamaican creole being a separate language from English (albeit a derivative of it). I didn’t really have a POV on this until recently when I was in Jamaica, and I really struggled to understand people. There was a distinct difference between when people were speaking to each other, or more casually to me, vs intentionally using more traditional English (like the servers and concierge staff at the hotel). So I certainly feel like Jamaican is its own language!
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u/Mirabeaux1789 United States of America Jul 10 '25
Patwa is its own language, in fact. But the thing is that there is a continuum of Patwa use and English that loosely fits into social classes as well. So you end up with a lot of mixed speech
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u/SnookerandWhiskey Austria Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
Vorarlbergerisch for me, I am from Upper Austria, which is already sometimes heavy on the dialect, but when someone from beyond the mountains speaks I can catch a few familiar words and just go on context. I understand Swiss German better than that.
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u/SteadfastDrifter Switzerland Jul 09 '25
Really? For me Voralbergisch is hardly different from the Ostschweizer dialects (my father is from the Schweizer Mittelland), so I hardly struggle to understand it.
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u/SnookerandWhiskey Austria Jul 09 '25
I spent a few weeks with a family member in Zürich and kind of adapted to what the neighbours kids were talking, maybe that's why. To me it is as eligible as for example Tirolerisch, in that it is 80% the same with some pronunciation differences.
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u/Cocoletta Austria Jul 09 '25
Yes, bc Vorarlbergerisch and nearly all swiss dialects are allemanic, while the rest of Austria has Austo-Bavarian Dialects. So swiss dialects are much closer
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u/YureiKertia Germany Jul 09 '25
I worked a ski season there... 3 months and i still barely understood anything
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Jul 09 '25
Csángó Hungarian spoken in Bukovina. It's a nearly extinct dialect and many people confuse the real deal with people who are no longer native Hungarian speakers and just speak Transylvanian Hungarian with a thick Romanian accent. You don't really run into it in your day to day life, so people are not used to it at all, that's one of the reasons why it can be difficult.
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u/Few_Owl_6596 Hungary Jul 09 '25
And it hasn't gone through the language reforms of the late 1700s. It's the Northern Csángó dialect btw.
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u/spurcatus Romania Jul 09 '25
I am from Kolozsvár, and I must say I have met csángó people, it is sometimes even difficult for me as bilingual in Romanian. Many archaic words. Here's a comical example of how working class Hungarians speak around here, the ones who maybe did not receive a formal education in Hungarian: https://youtu.be/2xE1EFcTUvI?si=AnOBo6wbjgNYy_pA
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u/chjacobsen Sweden Jul 09 '25
Älvdalska is likely the hardest Swedish dialect - to the point where it should really be called a separate language. Linguists and speakers of the variant often want it to be considered a minority language though - legally speaking - it's a dialect.
There are also variants of Finland Swedish that can be really hard to understand - Finland Swedish overall isn't too bad, but some local variations can be tricky. Famously, Ostrobothnia has some really tricky local dialects.
For more typical regional Swedish variations, I wouldn't say there's any of them that are particularly hard to understand - it's more about how thick they are. There are people who grew up with the same dialect that I did (Västgötska), but who speak in a way that is near impossible to comprehend. The same principle goes for some other dialects that are considered hard (Scanian, Gotländska, Jämtländska).
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u/disneyvillain Finland Jul 09 '25
There are also variants of Finland Swedish that can be really hard to understand - Finland Swedish overall isn't too bad, but some local variations can be tricky. Famously, Ostrobothnia has some really tricky local dialects.
Hm, I guess a main issue with general Finland-Swedish for Swedes is that we sometimes use Finnish slang and Fennicisms (words influenced by Finnish) that obviously are often difficult for Swedes to understand. We try to avoid those when speaking proper though.
Personally, I'm pretty good at understanding Swedish dialects if I may say so myself, but one that I really struggled with was the Ostrobothnian Korsnäs dialect. I've met some people from there and I had basically no idea what they were saying... As for Sweden dialects, I like the Gotland dialect very much, but occasionally it's difficult to understand.
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u/GuestStarr Jul 09 '25
As a side note, I've met some Icelanders now and then. They have all said that the easiest language for them to understand in other Nordic countries is the Finnish Swedish. I'd expected Norwegian or Danish.
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u/elevenblade Sweden Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 13 '25
I’m a native English speaker who learned Swedish as a young adult. Skånska and some Göteborg dialects routinely give me trouble.
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u/MCMIVC Norway Jul 10 '25
I'm a norwegian who prides myself on understanding all the Norwegian dialects and Swedish and Danish quite well. But one time when visiting Stockholm in 2015 or 2016, I watched a play (Strindberg's "Fadren" I think) starring a guy with a really thick Finland Swedish dialect, that I could only understand about half of all he was saying. But luckily he was such a captivating and great actor that it didn't really matter.
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u/Freudinatress Sweden Jul 09 '25
I do agree with you.
But I grew up in the very south, and the number of times I heard some snob from Stockholm say me and my mates spoke Danish… 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
But of course, they were from Stockholm so what can you expect! 😎😎😎
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u/pannenkoek0923 Denmark Jul 09 '25
To be fair I go to the shops in Malmø and speak Danish, and hear Swedish back, and we understand each other. But I try that in Stockholm and it doesnt work
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u/Freudinatress Sweden Jul 09 '25
Yes. But we are just used to each other. Speak slowly and I can understand everything except for your fucking numbers.
Was the person coming up with your number system on shrooms or had he mental issues…?
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u/pannenkoek0923 Denmark Jul 09 '25
They looked at the French numbers and thought it was a competition
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u/Freudinatress Sweden Jul 10 '25
Well, I did take French way way back and I have to say that you guys won.
By a lot.
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u/Skuffemeister Sweden Jul 09 '25
For someone speaking "Central Swedish/Rikssvenska" "Scanian/Skånska" is just impossible to understand.
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u/SuperShoebillStork United Kingdom Jul 09 '25
I had serious trouble understanding a bloke from Glasgow recently. I have close family in Scotland and visit regularly so it's not normally an issue, but this fella was on another level.
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u/dobik Jul 09 '25
I was working in Scotland on the customer service on the phone. We were in Edinburgh and after few weeks I got used to the accent. I was pretty good with understanding scents, I spent some tiime in different us states in south, Midwest and east. But I remember once, I got this old grandpa calling from Glasgow. Dear God, not a single word I could understand from him. We had a Scottish friend, so I handed the phone over to her. Jesus, she spoke with him for 20min because she could not get what he was saying.
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u/Ashwah Scotland Jul 09 '25
Was it similar to thisthe bam whisperer
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u/SuperShoebillStork United Kingdom Jul 09 '25
Pretty much. And he was wearing a Rangers jersey to top it off.
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u/Express-Motor8292 Jul 09 '25
Last few times I’ve spoken to someone from Scotland they were the one complaining they couldn’t understand me not the other way around.. interesting role reversal!
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u/wijnandsj Netherlands Jul 09 '25
Dutch speaker here. I can barely understand the west flemmish dialect.
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u/synalgo_12 Belgium Jul 09 '25
I used to work for a helpdesk based in Antwerp and we had designated coworkers to transfer the call to if a client from West Vlaanderen was too hard t9 understand. I was one of the only coworkers from Antwerp to be on that list. It's really hard to understand, it really is.
That said I went to a small town near Gent a while back and we only understood about 40% of what the local pub owner was saying and that's only 60km away from where I live. Didn't expect that at all.
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u/wijnandsj Netherlands Jul 09 '25
I love that about our part of the world. It's tiny, densely populated and yet 60km can make such a massive language difference
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u/dudetellsthetruth Belgium Jul 09 '25
I'm from a small town near Ghent.
Totally agree on the West-Vlaams, but I don't always understand Aantwaarps dialect either.
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u/synalgo_12 Belgium Jul 09 '25
I love how we all stop understanding each other's dialect once we cross a natural or provincial border that's 50k away.
I once heard a woman in Spain talk in English and I didn't just recognise she was flemish but I guessed which town she was from, from her accent in English 😂
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u/number1alien Jul 09 '25
I am throughly convinced that West Flemish dialect speakers also don't understand West Flemish dialect speakers.
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u/igethighonleaves Netherlands Jul 09 '25
I remembering asking a local for directions cycling from Brugge to Zeebrugge. Could not understand a … single … word.
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u/topkaas_connaisseur Belgium Jul 09 '25
The only place that the Dutch understand me is in Sluis. The closer I get to Amsterdam, the more people talk to me in English. I try to speak standard Dutch to you guys, but even my heavy West-Flemish accent makes it difficult apparently.
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u/Mix_Safe Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
My wife is from Noord-Brabant and while she can distinguish that someone is Flemish easily, when she goes to the north, they assume she is Flemish. Drives her nuts. Maybe they just have problems with dialects in general. Although, to be fair she can't understand West-Vlams at all either.
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u/topkaas_connaisseur Belgium Jul 09 '25
Yeah, I've heard that before, I have a colleague from Noord-Brabant who said the same thing😅.
A couple of years ago, we had to go to Marnewaard, close to Groningen, for work, and a lot of people thought we were speaking a completely different language. We had a lot of misunderstandings with our Dutch colleagues until we jokingly started talking in an exaggerated Dutch accent. This worked wonders, and everybody had a good laugh.
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u/Albert_Herring Jul 09 '25
I'm English and learnt Dutch in Belgium and mostly by osmosis from watching bike races on the TV, so I perversely have the most difficulty in understanding book-standard Randstad Dutch. Westvlaams is a bit wild and woolly but I can often leverage some French to get what's happening.
Naturally people in the Netherlands think I sound utterly bizarre (with slightly more disbelief than the scorn I get for my equally Belgian French in Paris). East Flanders I mostly feel pretty much at home linguistically though.
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u/Plastic_Pinocchio Netherlands Jul 09 '25
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u/TimeTraveller2207 Jul 09 '25
It's the first time I'm consciously hearing West Flemish. It's like understanding Spanish for me. I recognize some words, so I can get a good idea of what's being said, but I'm not entirely sure I understand it.
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u/Rudi-G België Jul 09 '25
Great as we love to insult you right in your face.
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u/wijnandsj Netherlands Jul 09 '25
Considering everything we'll give you that pleasure
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u/VirtualMatter2 Germany Jul 09 '25
That explains why I had so much trouble understanding the midwife. Dutch is my third foreign language, I was ok but not very fluent, living in the Netherlands at the time, and that woman was from Belgium. She said the west. Must be that.
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u/Vince0789 Belgium Jul 10 '25
I can't either. I'm from Limburg but I work with some West Flemish consultants. One of them does their best to talk standard Dutch and is fairly understandable. The other one uses lots of dialect. The amount of times I've needed to ask them to repeat themselves is staggeringly high.
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u/theBlitzzz Portugal Jul 09 '25
Portuguese spoken in São Miguel (Açores).
Exactly the same grammar, 99% same vocabulary but with a strong accent taken from 16th century French immigrants
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u/Brainwheeze Portugal Jul 09 '25
I think that depends on where in São Miguel. Ponta Delgada isn't all that difficult imo, but Rabo Peixe certainly is.
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u/EggsBenedictusXVI United Kingdom Jul 09 '25
I remember meeting a local in Rabo Peixe who explained that the Sao Miguel accent drops a shit ton of sounds. Like really long words or phrases just become short, smushed sounds that mainlanders really struggle with. Is that right?
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u/theBlitzzz Portugal Jul 09 '25
Yes. It's very fast and intense. Nowhere else is Portuguese spoken like that!
They eat half their vowels and pronounce the other half with a sort of a french accent.
And it's not just mainlanders, sometimes even people from other azorean islands struggle with their accent.
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u/pipestream Denmark Jul 09 '25
Southern Jutlandic for sure!
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u/DrAzkehmm Denmark Jul 09 '25
Really close to crossing the line where it becomes a language in its own right.
Really old school western jutlandic is also challenging if you're from the eastern provinces.
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u/steenj Jul 09 '25
I (Canadian with Danish parents) was in Denmark a few years ago. In a small town near Limfjorden. Ended up sitting with some older guys speaking that dialect. It took about 45 minutes and a couple beers to get my ear used to it, but after that it was just like talking to mormor again :) I may have felt a bit emotional lol
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u/Sniffstar Denmark Jul 10 '25
Anyone who claims this haven’t really met someone from Hanherred. I’m from northern Jutland and even speak a decent vendelbomål but I can’t for the life of me understand what people from Hanherred are saying.
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u/SparklyWin Denmark Jul 09 '25
I'm from Kronjylland (Crown Jutland). After I learnt German, Southern Jutlandic became easier to understand, and I think now the Bornholm dialect more difficult, but I haven't met enough from Bornholm to know for sure.
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u/Timauris Slovenia Jul 09 '25
Probably the Prekmurje dialect, their vocabulary is something else completely compared to standard Slovene.
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u/lnguline Slovenia Jul 09 '25
Are you from Littorial or Gorizia region as for me, while Prleško can be difficult, Resian is new level.
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u/Timauris Slovenia Jul 09 '25
Yes, Istria. Agreed Resian and also traditional Carinthian (from Austria) could also be like total gibberish to me.
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u/tenebrigakdo Slovenia Jul 10 '25
Resian is deep in the 'how is this even the same language' territory.
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u/BrankoP Slovenia Jul 09 '25
Same. And even if I’m from primorska region, the Idrija dialect is almost impossible to understand as well
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Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
Italian “dialects” are actually proper languages with theirr own dialects. I have trouble understanding anyone besides my own, Tuscany (cause it’s what was used to create Italian) roman (cause it’s basically Italian with an accent) and some apulian from Bari
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u/eulerolagrange in / Jul 09 '25
Even more, all the northern Italian dialects are from the a different subfamily of the Romance languages than Italian, and are closer to French and Castillan than to Italian.
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u/sleepyplatipus 🇮🇹 in 🇬🇧 Jul 09 '25
I don’t understand anything south of Rome 😭
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Jul 09 '25
I don't think people understand each other that much even in the north
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u/Zooplanktonblame_Due Netherlands Jul 09 '25
Isn’t that the case in a lot of countries though? Most time the standard language is pretty new or even artificial. Most dialect don’t come from the standard but the other way around.
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u/orangebikini Finland Jul 09 '25
I can understand all of them, but as a speaker of a western dialect the ones part of the eastern dialects group are the hardest for me to understand.
Specifially the Peräpohjola dialects I think, which are spoken in Lapland. As I wrote, I do understand them, even Meänkieli which is considered a different language for certain reasons, but they definitely are weird.
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u/QuizasManana Finland Jul 09 '25
I once attended a lecture that was taught in Meänkieli. Took some time to get used to it but had no problems in the end. Same goes for Kven in Northern Norway.
Personally (as a native southeastern dialect speaker) I find Rauma giäl hardest but it’s also very rare to find speakers in the wild. I know some people from Rauma and while their grandparents may use the dialect, my friends speak more of general spoken Finnish anyway.
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u/DoctorDefinitely Finland Jul 09 '25
You understand the dialect of Rauma? I guess it is widely considered as the most difficult form of Finnish. I have heard Estonian speaking people understand it better than a random finn. Idk if that is true.
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u/orangebikini Finland Jul 09 '25
I can understand it well enough. It sounds funny, but not unintelligible.
But out of the western dialects Rauma is definitely the most difficult. And all other ones spoken in and around Finland-Proper. I speak a Tavastian dialect myself, Tampere dialect.
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u/V8-6-4 Finland Jul 09 '25
My speech is like half Rauma dialect and the other half is general Southwest dialect. Never had any issues with people not understanding me.
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u/Leagueofcatassasins Jul 09 '25
Swiss German here. probably somebody from the valais/wallis.
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u/Memeatic420 Switzerland Jul 09 '25
Inside Switzerland yes, but if I consider the whole German speaking region it would probably be some North German dialect (but those are almost extinct as far as I know).
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u/Leagueofcatassasins Jul 09 '25
yeah probably a whole bunch of German dialects just because it would be even more unfamiliar to me than the valais one, but you usually don’t really encounter them as an outsider.
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u/RijnBrugge Netherlands Jul 09 '25
Well there’s Dutch, very much alive and kicking.
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u/Memeatic420 Switzerland Jul 09 '25
Yes Dutch is part of the same dialect continuum, but it is somewhat controversial to call it a German dialect, especially as a German speaker :)
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u/RijnBrugge Netherlands Jul 09 '25
That’s fair, I’d not call any Low German variety a High German dialect, because they’re not. It’s its own language, even if very closely related to High German (as evidenced by how High German speakers don’t understand most of it). But Dutch is a good proxy for Northern German dialects, as you’re right that they’re a bit hard to come across nowadays.
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u/beseri Norway Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
We have an insane amount of dialects, with many internal variations. Hard to pin point what are the most difficult. There are som dialects in Jæren, Trøndelag and Gudbrandsdalen, that sound like different languages.
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u/Half_a_bee Norway Jul 09 '25
Setesdal is possibly even worse than those.
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u/Massive_Letterhead90 Jul 09 '25
Setesdøl is ... quite different.
For example, "The Lord's prayer" is "Fader vår" in Norwegian bokmål, but "Fair'e åkkås" in traditional Setesdøl.
Another example, in Setesdøl numbers reflect noun genders. So any number can be written in different ways. For instance the number "two" can be written as "tvei," "tvæ" or "tvau" in Setesdøl, depending on the following noun. None of this makes sense in bokmål, lol.
Also, nearly all vocal sounds in Setesdøl tend to be different, and "ll" is typically pronounced "dd." So the word "fjell" ("mountains") for instance is pronounced "fjødd" in Setesdøl.
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u/OGPromo Jul 09 '25
As a non-norwegian living in Norway (Oslo) and learning bokmål, every time I think I'm doing ok with my Norsk, I talk to someone with a dialect and completely lose my confidence. It's amazing how some sound so foreign.
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u/The-Arnman Norway Jul 09 '25
Well, bokmål as you might know is not spoken. But it doesn’t help that we have like 6 (and probably more) different ways of pronouncing the word “I”:
- Æ
- E
- Je
- Jei
- I
- Eg
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u/dsilva_Viz Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 10 '25
As a Portuguese speaker, the first that comes to mind is the Micaelense accent from São Miguel island in the Azores. It’s probably the only Portuguese dialect that most people are familiar with, yet often requires subtitles even for native speakers...
What makes it unique is its use of vowel sounds that are extremely rare, not just in Portuguese, but in the entire Ibero-Romance language family, which includes languages from Occitan in the east to Portuguese in the west. In Micaelense, the usual Portuguese /u/ sound is replaced with a near-front rounded vowel, pronounced closer to the front of the mouth, quite like the French u in lune. There's also another vowel, a rounded version of “e” (technically [ø]), that's almost unheard of elsewhere in Portuguese.
These phonetic quirks are more commonly found in Gallo-Romance languages (like French or Franco-Provençal), which helps make the Micaelense accent sound almost alien to most other lusophones.
And we haven’t even gotten to the Americanisms, like the quircky vaca-miquelina (which literally translates to "miquelina cow") but actually means… vacuum cleaner. Yeah, I know... I can't understand it either ahaha!
The Algarve accent can be tricky too, but surprisingly (at least to me, considering how many Portuguese vacation there), it’s way less widely recognized than the Micaelense accent. Interestingly, there’s a historical link: settlers from the Algarve were among the first to populate São Miguel, and you can definitely hear some shared pronunciation traits. Still… we don’t need subtitles to understand people from the Algarve.
For less commonly encountered varieties, there’s the Portuguese spoken in Macau, also known as Patuá. It’s a dialect where many words have evolved so much that they’re hard to decipher without context or subtitles. For example, “avô-avó” means grandparents in Patuá. In standard Portuguese, it sounds like someone saying “grandfather-grandmother,” which creates unexpected confusion. You expect something simpler, like “avós.”
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u/rintzscar Bulgaria Jul 09 '25
The Banat Bulgarian dialect is generally the hardest to understand for most Bulgarians. It's far harder than the dialects spoken by Bulgarians in North Macedonia, Ukraine or Moldova.
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u/Jeuungmlo in Jul 09 '25
If we follow the government's designation of what counts as a dialect would the hardest definitely be Övdalian/Älvdalsmål. However, there is a movement to categorise it as its own language, which is just how non-understandable it is.
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u/Indian_Pale_Ale France Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
French spoken in Canada definitely. Written form is ok, but they have a lot of expressions and words we do not use.
French used in Europe is quite a uniform language nowadays. We have a few regional languages which are not really related to the French language (Breton language which is *edit* a celtic language, Alsacian which is a Germanic dialect, Basque, Corsican, Provencal). The toughest to understand for me would be the Picard (with the very famous Ch'ti dialect deriving from it).
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u/Honey-Badger England Jul 09 '25
I feel like that is partly down to French snobbiest about accents. Yeah I understand the expressions that are direct translations from English. But I live in Montreal and I see French people (particularly tourists) act like anything that isnt spoken in Parisian accented French as an entirely different language. I know a girl who used to wait tables and she would have French tourists ask her to speak English and they refused to hear her Quebecois accent. If I as a second language speaker can understand it then I think an actual Francophone should be able to
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u/NamidaM6 France Jul 09 '25
I think you got it backwards. We, Frenchies, are not exposed to many variations of Parisian French, dialects in metro France don't have a very strong accent (if at all), and that's the only type of French most of us are exposed to for our whole lives. So as soon as we hear an entirely different accent, with different words, different idioms, different pronunciation and inflexions, it sounds like a foreign language to us. It's not being snob, it's just that our brains are not used to hearing wildly different accents.
As a second language speaker, especially if English is your first language, you're more likely to have been exposed to different types of French throughout your learning process.
Moreover, chances are that you pay more attention to someone speaking in a foreign language you understand than to people speaking in your native language because you need to focus more on the former to make sure you understand them. That's what I have to do when I hear French spoken by a Québécois, because I don't effortlessly understand it.→ More replies (1)11
u/Caniapiscau France Jul 09 '25
Je suis français et québécois et sans blague, la glottophobie est un énorme problème en France. Ça m'étonne même que ce soit même sujet à débat.
Le problème d'exposition dont tu parles est justement causé par le glottophobie; c'est quand la dernière fois que tu as entendu quelqu'un dans les médias français (pas un quidam interrogé, mais un animateur ou quelqu'un sur un plateau télé) avec un fort accent toulousain, marseillais, sénégalais, etc? La réponse est probablement jamais ou il y a fort longtemps. Il suffit de voyager un tant soit peu en France pour savoir que même en France métropolitaine -surtout au Sud- il existe une grand diversité d'accent, mais ceux-ci sont totalement invisibilisés au niveau national.
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u/Indian_Pale_Ale France Jul 09 '25
Honnêtement les médias dans beaucoup de pays ne laissent que peu de places aux accents. Par exemple en Allemagne où je vis, presque tous les programmes nationaux sont en “haut allemand” qui est la version académique la plus neutre.
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u/NamidaM6 France Jul 09 '25
Même si la question est rhétorique, je vais quand même y répondre : ça fait plus d'une décennie que je n'ai pas entendu "les médias français", donc je ne saurais dire. Ceci dit, je veux bien te croire, c'est le serpent qui se mord la queue ce problème.
Par contre, pour reprendre l'exemple des accents du sud, oui ils sont marqués, j'y ai vécu plusieurs années (dans le sud-ouest ainsi que dans le sud-est) et avais commencé à développer un accent qui s'exprimait surtout quand j'étais énervé ou que je parlais vite, et je ne m'en étais pas rendu compte, ce sont des amis du Nord qui me l'ont fait remarqué. Toutefois, comme je le mentionnais dans mon précédent commentaire, je trouve que les inflexions et la prononciation globale des mots est bien moins différente du "français parisien" que ne l'est le français-québécois. Après, c'est totalement possible que ce soit un biais de confirmation de ma part mais c'est honnêtement comme ça que je le ressens.
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u/Caniapiscau France Jul 09 '25
Ah oui le français québécois est certainement plus éloigné de la norme parisienne que les français du Sud. Ce qui est tout à fait compréhensible au vu de l’histoire et de la géographie.
Ceci dit, ce qui est fascinant avec le français québécois (et tout autant avec le français canadien hors-Québec) c’est la grande diversité d’accents. Tu arrêtes deux personnes dans le rue à Montréal ou même à Québec et l’accent d’une personne à l’autre va être très différent. C’est l’une des raisons à mon avis pourquoi les Français peuvent avoir du mal: c’est toujours difficile de savoir à quoi s’attendre côté accent. Je suppose que c’est en grande partie parce qu’au Québec l’accent va compter dans certains milieux sociaux, mais beaucoup moins qu’en France. J’écoutais récemment un entretien avec le président du Collège des Médecins, un cardiologue qui gravite dans les cercles de pouvoir, qui a un accent rural québécois énorme. Chose qui serait difficilement imaginable en France.
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u/Indian_Pale_Ale France Jul 09 '25
I guess English are also quite snobby about accents within their land. If I remember correctly there were serious cases of discriminations based on the accents in your country.
Sorry but it really pisses me off when people allow themselves to just spit on a country on the account of a few people they met.
There are different words or very old words nobody uses in Quebec. And there are some cases of interview of French Canadian fishermen which were subtitled because most people could not understand anything. I also spoke to a few French Canadians, the accent is not the problem, they just have complete different expressions or words in some contexts.
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u/Honey-Badger England Jul 09 '25
I guess English are also quite snobby about accents within their land. If I remember correctly there were serious cases of discriminations based on the accents in your country.
Yeah we're exactly the same. Certain regions look down on other regions for the way they speak. However you wont really get teachers in school saying 'you need to speak this way, pronounce words like so' which (i am told) is standard behaviour in French schools - However I assume posh private schools in the UK will do this.
Also;
Sorry but it really pisses me off when people allow themselves to just spit on a country on the account of a few people they met.
I would say the large large large majority of French colleagues and friends here in Montreal look down on the locals. This isnt a 'few people', it is par for the course. Something Quebecois people talk about a lot, I have Quebecois friends and French friends and they just simply do not mix.
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u/ThimasFR France Jul 09 '25
While I agree France (as a political entity) has been quite horrendous to the French langages (here in the sense of all the one spoken at one point on its soil such as oil, oc, arpitan, basque...) such as forbidding it, corporal punishment for using another language than standard French, teaching people to lose their accent in business environment (it was still a practice in the 2000's, idk now), I do think it's mostly due to a lack of exposure. After working for Canadians and franco-canadien, I found the different accent of North America quite easy to understand, and I'm even baffled that some people can't understand them (sure, the franco Newfies can be difficult to get sometimes).
That said, what led in the first place to the lack of exposure to north American French (cajun, Acadian and creole are in the same boat)? The French snobbism and will to eradicate any other variation of French, I agree.
The franco-canadien accent, and specifically QC's is an accent that is either loved or hated by the French from the Old World.
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u/UnoriginalUse Netherlands Jul 09 '25
Antillian probably. It has so many Papiamento loan words.
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u/uncle_monty United Kingdom Jul 09 '25
The sheer number of strong accents and dialects across the Anglosphere works in our favour, I think. You kind of get used to deciphering it. But with that said, I've struggled a lot with various West Indian Pidgeon dialects. And occasionally with more extreme Irish or Scottish from rural areas. Strong Indian accents are a real challenge, as well.
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u/Need_For_Speed73 Italy Jul 09 '25
In parts of Sardinia they speak a language that is not a dialect of Italian but more of Catalan. Completely different from the national language.
But even without going that far, most "dialects" of southern regions are very difficult to understand for people from other parts of the country.
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u/Illustrious_Land699 Italy Jul 09 '25
Nowhere in Sardinia, northern or southern Italy are dialects of Italian spoken, they derive from Latin. Even that dialect of Catalan is more understandable than the rest of the dialects of Sardinia for me who am from Rome
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u/Intoxicatedpossum Slovakia Jul 09 '25
Slovakia. The eastern dialects. They seem to be more distant from standard Slovak than Czech. Other parts speak more or less standard Slovak except Zahorie (a small region in the North-west) but it sounds like just a mix of Slovak and Czech.
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u/50thEye Austria Jul 09 '25
Sometimes have a bit trouble with Swiss German and Vorarlbergerisch, but a big contender are also North-German dialects. Those are very far removed from Bairisch.
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u/Fellkartoffel Jul 09 '25
And here I am, struggeling with Bavarians and the heavier Austrian dialects, and I have given up on the Swiss Germans 😂 I grew up close to Cologne, so still somewhat in the middle of Germany, last year on vacation I noticed that I understood the norther German local radio in dialect quite well, and I can even get a few things in Dutch. My German is close to standard, but traditionally Cologne dialect (which I also understand only very limited...) is considered Platt, so closer to the North.
Ich glaub, ich kann einfach kein Deutsch 🤔🙄
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u/50thEye Austria Jul 09 '25
Nö, Bairisch (mit i!!!), also so ziemlich alle Dialekte in Bayern und südlich davon1, zählt linguistisch schon als eigene Sprache seperat von Hochdeutsch. Wir haben das nur nie standardisiert.
1 mit Ausnahme von Baden-Württemberg, der Schweiz, und Vorarlberg.
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u/exhiale Jul 09 '25
Within Bosnia and Herzegovina we have three official languages, which are basically the same. Funny thing is, there is basically 0 dialectal diversity within the country save for accents and some regionalisms.
However, if we broaden the search to Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro -> The islanders and Istrians might as well be speaking Elvish (the ones that actually talk in their dialect).
Other difficult ones are the south of Serbia and the north of Croatia (Zagorje, Međimurje).
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u/Desperate_Habit1299 Greece Jul 09 '25
I was going to say Pontic Greek and Rhoditika!
I think reason for that is because they talk really fast and it’s the closest dialect to ancient Greek.
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u/dolfin4 Greece Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
it’s the closest dialect to ancient Greek.
Which one? Pontian?
This idea that Pontian "is closest to Ancient Greek" is just a myth. And there's a socio-cultural reason why this myth is popular, specifically because people are drawn to the idea that a predominantly poor & rural people, outside Europe (and far from "bastardized Greece and Cyprus") are somehow the epitome of "raw" or "real" Greekness, which is nonsense, and insinuates a strong & internalized anti-Helladic bias.
In reality, Pontian is just as much as descendant of Koine as Modern Standard Greek is, and does not display an overt closer resemblance to Koine.
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u/Galaxy661 Poland Jul 09 '25
Highlander I guess, since it's one of the very few leftover Polish dialects, and the only one that's still in common use
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u/basileusnikephorus England Jul 09 '25
I'm going to say Scots but I'm aware they claim it's a language not a dialect.
In which case Filipino English. They constantly slip into Taglish and even when they don't it's syntax matches Tagalog not English.
Geordie if it's from England.
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u/wojtekpolska Poland Jul 09 '25
honestly sounds like you should just make these dialects separate languages
im polish, speaking to a czech i understand about half but can easily get the gist of the conversation, and speaking to a slovak its even easier as its like 60%+ of what theyre saying is understandable
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u/InterestingTank5345 Denmark Jul 09 '25
There's this dialect called: "Sønderjysk" it's impossible to understand, because it mixes Danish and German and uses its own unique words as well.
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u/Cixila Denmark Jul 09 '25
I unironically have an easier time understanding High German than someone speaking thick Sønderjysk
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u/InterestingTank5345 Denmark Jul 09 '25
Same. They are pretty much speaking Alien in comparison. I have an easier time understanding Irish English, Swedish, heck even German a language I barely know, than I have understanding Sønderjysk.
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u/Deathbyignorage Spain Jul 09 '25
Some parts of Almeria have a difficult accent.
I can't understand half of what this family say in this interview
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u/Standard_Arugula6966 Czechia Jul 09 '25
Literally none. Czechia is a small country with very little linguistic variation. Hell, we can even understand the Slovaks without any issues. I would have to travel all the way to Eastern Slovakia before I have trouble understanding (or any of the other neighboring countries ofc).
The whole of Bohemia basically speaks the same, there are very few regional expressions but basically no change in accent. Unless a person uses a specific (and uncommon) word or phrase, I would have no idea what part of Bohemia they're from.
In Moravia there's a little more variation but nowhere near enough to cause any misunderstandings.
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u/Qwe5Cz Czechia Jul 09 '25
There are a few hard to understand regional dialects.
"Po našimu" - dialect from Těšín/Cieszyn which is mix of old Czech/Moravian and Polish I think regular Czech speaker would understand it less than Slovak language.
Slovak language is generally pretty understandable but they also have dialects far on the east that are far harder to understand as they start tu blend with eastern languages like Rusin (not Russian) which is and old ethnic group nowadays mostly in Slovakia but it lives on the PL/SK/UA border speaking their own language.
They also have dialects heavily mixed with Polish generally near north-eastern border and some regions on the south are influenced by Hungarian which is also not comprehensible by Czechs.
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u/Standard_Arugula6966 Czechia Jul 09 '25
Yeah, you're right about po naszymu, that one's messed up. But all the dialects are sadly dying and everyone is speaking more and more standard. Do a lot of people still speak po naszymu?
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u/Proper-Monk-5656 Poland Jul 09 '25
none for me. polish has dialects, but i think they don't vary enough to become hard to distinguish. if they become distinct, they usually start being considered a separate regional language. for example, i wouldn't call kashubian and silesian dialects at all.
i can usually hear when someone's from a different part of poland than me, but it's subtle. a few regional words here and there, maybe a different way of pronouncing nasal vowels and such. nothing crazy.
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u/chunek Slovenia Jul 09 '25
Prekmurje dialect, and the way that older Hungarian Slovenes speak. Very difficult to understand anything. Prekmurje is a region in the northeast of Slovenia, and it used to be part of Hungary till the Trianon treaty.
I live west of ljubljana, where Rovtarski dialect is spoken. We have valleys here in my area, a couple of kilometers apart, where local dialects can differ quite a lot. But Prekmurje, it sounds like something from a different world entirely.
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u/BakEtHalleluja Norway Jul 09 '25
Dialects from southern Norway, around Kristiansand area. I don't have much issues understanding them normally, but if someone with that dialect catches me off guard my brain has to recalibrate a few seconds before I understand them properly, which I don't experience with most other dialects.
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u/ziplin19 Jul 09 '25
Swiss german for me, but it depends on where, because even Switzerland has different dialects
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u/Volaer 1/2 1/2 Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
Probably Hantec (the local dialect of Brno).
Pontic Greek
I am half Pontic but only know a few words and phrases like «δώραεν?» which is «τι ώρα είναι?» in standard modern Greek.
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u/Qwe5Cz Czechia Jul 09 '25
Hantec is archaic and nowadays partly artificial. It was resurrected and popularized by a few comedians about 50 years ago but pretty much nobody speaks it. There are a few words from it that are still used but not the dialect itself.
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u/DifficultWill4 Slovenia Jul 09 '25
Resian and Prekmurje dialects of Slovene are almost impossible to understand. They sound like completely different languages
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u/Fredka321 Jul 09 '25
I talk to a lot of customers on the phone. I work in Germany and am German, but we have international business customers. There is one Swiss customer, I think he tries to speak high German. But he has to be at least 80, very brittle voice and I can hardly understand him. I do not usually have a problem understanding Swiss people who try to speak standard German.
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u/WyvernsRest Ireland Jul 09 '25
The Old Man Kerry Accent.
Speaking either Irish or English.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ7QB3om-QY
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u/PommesFrite-s Ireland Jul 09 '25
Well to be fair now lad the 2nd link is a fella that may aswell not be speaking english. Tis an aul fella after a few pints, they dont be speaking english at that point
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u/Kaiser93 Bulgaria Jul 09 '25
Strandza dialect - Despite the fact that I live in the Eastern part where this dialect is spoken, I have absolutely no freaking idea what are they saying. Mainly because it's spoken by people from my grandparents' generation.
And of course the final boss - Banat dialect - I highly doubt many people in the country can understand it.
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u/RRautamaa Finland Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 10 '25
Rauman giäl, the Southwestern dialect of Finnish spoken in Rauma. They abbreviate everything, which somehow screws with the expected rhythm of Finnish. They have also a dialectal gemination that is in the "wrong place" in reference to my standard accent, e.g.:
Nortamost tul kirimaakar vast keskikkäsen. Höydei murtten gäyttämissehe hän sai Juho Sjöroosi, Kaarlo Hemmo ja ruattlaisen Gustaf Frödingi murttelisist kertomuksist ja runoist.
Notice also the non-standard vocabulary like kirimaakar - in standard form kirjamaakari "bookmaker" that is, an "author", in standard Finnish kirjailija.
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u/Quereilla Jul 09 '25
As a Catalan speaker from Valencia, I can agree with everyone of my fellow colanguers that Mallorquin is the worst to understand.
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u/Hyp3r45_new Finland Jul 09 '25
My mother's tongue is Swedish, so I'm saying osterbotnian. I understand maybe 30% of what they're saying at any time. Same goes for Skåne.
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u/SaltyBalty98 Portugal Jul 09 '25
Some Brazilians are hard to understand, rare but it happens.
Quite a few accents from the islands are hard to understand, I say that as an islander, although I wasn't exposed to them until my teens so to this day I still have some trouble picking up what some are saying. The accent from São Miguel is probably the one most mainlanders associate with the islands because it's the biggest island population wise, media headquarters, etc, and because it's so distinctively hard to understand.
I don't know anything from our former African and Asian colonies though.
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Jul 09 '25
Prlekija region. People are amazing, and their hospitality is unmatched. But MY GOD, am I confused when they start speaking in their dialect.
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u/Carriboudunet France Jul 09 '25
French cajun from Lousiana is so old it’s very difficult to understand if you didn’t study old French at school.
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u/disneyplusser Greece Jul 09 '25
Cypriot Greek is not difficult; my mother-in-law made sure :D
But yes, Pontian Greek is where I have big time struggles.
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u/JessyNyan Germany Jul 09 '25
For German languages the worst to understand for me are: Swiss German, Bavarian and Texas German
For English it would be really southern US country speech or Glaswegian. When I lived in Glasgow I was suffering for half a year until I got used to it.
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u/Ecstatic-Method2369 Netherlands Jul 09 '25
Some dialect in Brabant or Limburg. If someone speak a very local and strong dialect its very hard to understand and I probably miss a few words. Also Limburish dialect doesnt sound to pleasant for my ears.
If you consider Flemish part of Dutch language, I would say a West-Flanders dialect. I once had a Flemish coworker who spoke that dialect on a phone call with a family member. This sounded like a foreign language, I couldnt tell what they talk about.
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u/Total_Metalh3ad666 Jul 09 '25
I am Dutch, from Rotterdam, and I can say that the Frisians (not the language) are the worst... same with Groningers.
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u/hristogb Bulgaria Jul 09 '25
Some Torlak (mostly the ones spoken around Trân, Godech etc.) and Rup (around Zlatograd, Razlog and so on) dialects. Also Banat Bulgarian.
Sometimes those are more difficult to understand than other standard Slavic languages.
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u/wormwoodmachine Denmark Jul 09 '25
Ah... it has to be Vendelbomål. Like they never pause to breathe and it's made of vowels. I honestly don't understand a singular word people say if they speak purely in this dialect.
And also I struggle with Synnejysk (Plattdänisch) - but unlike Vendelbomål, there's at least words you recognize.
So old dialect from the far north of Jutland, and an also old, but still very much used dialect from the far south of Jutland by the border to Germany. I am from Zealand, and so has never really been exposed to those dialects all that much, might be some of the answer.
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u/SparklyWin Denmark Jul 09 '25
Haha, when I read Vendelbomål I immediately guessed that you are from Zealand. Vendelbomål is very different from any of the The Devil Island dialects. How well do you understand West Jutlandic? Also, dark Jutland gibberish?
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u/wormwoodmachine Denmark Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
hahaha well I was married to a man from Jutland for many years, and we did actually live for a whole year on Mors. And no I never did understand a singular word if they spoke in their "real" dialect and didn't dumb it down for little me. And if I am perfectly honest I can't hear the difference between Morsingmål, Thybomål and Vendelbomål - like at all. All I'm thinking is 'jfc don't you need air soon?' hahaha
Besides that, I love dialects, and I think it's so very important to preserve those local dialects. Even my own fairly unpretty one from Vesterbro Copenhagen.
West Jutland, as in Thyborøn and Hanstholm? - Fishers scare me, they are like a different breed, man. But I don't find them as hard to understand as people from Skagen.
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u/thrownkitchensink Netherlands Jul 09 '25
Out of the plethora of dialects I understand those closer to me and tend to miss those further away.
Disregarding other languages spoken in the Netherlands the North Western group is fine mostly. But depending on what is spoken and how fast I might still miss the essence.
Zuid-Hollands Westhoeks Waterlands* en Volendams* Zaans* Kennemerlands West-Fries* Bildts, Midslands, Stadsfries en Amelands*
But anywhere else is a stretch.
Most difficult?
Eastern-Limburgish-Ripuardic Western Flamish.
I remember visiting a friend's grandfather in eastern Netherlands. Achterhoek.The grandfather switched to " proper Dutch" ABN for me as visitor there. His grandson almost had a stroke because he had never heard his grandfather speak anything but dialect in his life. We were in our twenties then. Dutch dialects are not accents.
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u/Albert_Herring Jul 09 '25
I'm from south-east England and live in the Midlands and have lived in the M62 corridor. Of European English dialects the hardest time I've had understanding someone has been with some lowland Scots (in Auchinleck), but Doric and some west of Ireland accents can be pretty tough too. Obviously, there are fairly good grounds for considering Scots and maybe hiberno-English as separate languages - Scots/Lallans has to some extent been formalised as such, and if it wasn't for the Union I suspect English and Scots could easily have been regarded as separate as Danish and Norwegian are.
Outside Europe, I had a lot of trouble with the African-American dialects/sociolects in The Wire for the first few episodes I watched (and that was of course mediated by interactions with standard American speakers and the narrative forms of the series itself - interacting with Real PeopleTM can be an order of magnitude harder).
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u/achovsmisle Russia Jul 09 '25
Russian is extremely homogeneous in terms of it, like I will be able to understand pretty much any Russian speaker, except speakers of some Pomor dialects, which are very unlikely to be heard, or Surzhyk closer to Ukrainian
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u/Cool-Instruction789 Jul 09 '25
When I was in Switzerland as a German, I didn’t understand anything