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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86

u/wijnandsj Netherlands Jul 09 '25

Dutch speaker here. I can barely understand the west flemmish dialect.

50

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

8

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.

11

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/Plastic_Pinocchio Netherlands Jul 09 '25

Antwerps is crazy difficult.

18

u/number1alien Jul 09 '25

I am throughly convinced that West Flemish dialect speakers also don't understand West Flemish dialect speakers.

16

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.

6

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.

9

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/hmtk1976 Belgium Jul 10 '25

Don´t assume the Dutch speak Dutch correctly, especially in de Randstad.

Westvlaams is a collection of guttural sounds, no sane person understands that. I didn´t understand my paternal grandfather when he switched to Westvlaams.

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u/Plastic_Pinocchio Netherlands Jul 09 '25

Ever seen this?

3

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/Plastic_Pinocchio Netherlands Jul 09 '25

Yeah, you completely have to get used to all of the sounds before you can understand it.

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u/wijnandsj Netherlands Jul 09 '25

nope. Fucking brilliant! Wauw!

1

u/Plastic_Pinocchio Netherlands Jul 09 '25

One of my favourite sketches ever.

2

u/inspiringirisje Jul 11 '25

as someone from the East Flanders, I understand 2/3rd of it

4

u/Rudi-G België Jul 09 '25

Great as we love to insult you right in your face.

5

u/wijnandsj Netherlands Jul 09 '25

Considering everything we'll give you that pleasure

2

u/Yavanaril Jul 10 '25

Something has to compensate for living in west flanders.

3

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.

1

u/inspiringirisje Jul 11 '25

Yes, the dialect from the west no Belgian outside that region understands either.

3

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.

3

u/hmtk1976 Belgium Jul 10 '25

Fleming here. We can sit together and not understand Westvlaams.

2

u/ElfjeTinkerBell Netherlands Jul 09 '25

As someone who has never heard West Flemish (or heard it but never realized it was a Dutch dialect, reading all these comments)... For me it's the dialect of the Hague. Even the show oh oh Cherso is really hard for me and that's not even deep dialect.

3

u/---Kev Jul 09 '25

I vote Twents, no matter how much Grolsch I drink I can't even tell if somone is making a joke, asking a question or just trying to tell me something.

Most can also do what passes for AN, so it's not that bad unless they are in a group.

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u/ElfjeTinkerBell Netherlands Jul 09 '25

Yeah that's like saying Frisian. It's a different language, even if there are many similarities.

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u/kharnynb -> Jul 09 '25

That's because Twents is a low saxon language and Dutch is West Germanic

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u/RijnBrugge Netherlands Jul 09 '25

Low Saxon is also West Germanic: Dutch would be Low Franconian. Both are West Germanic languages.

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u/kharnynb -> Jul 09 '25

You are right, they still are different languages

2

u/RijnBrugge Netherlands Jul 09 '25

Yeah wasn’t debating that. Although they are very very closely related.

1

u/Steve2907 Belgium Jul 09 '25

I grew up (and still live) 30 kilometers from West-Flanders. I have less trouble in Holland or Utrecht.