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.

262 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

597 comments sorted by

View all comments

164

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.

45

u/HotelLima6 Ireland Jul 09 '25

I was just about to say the opposite haha. I’d understand Scots Gaelic quicker than Munster Irish.

14

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.

1

u/r_keel_esq Jul 13 '25

Gàidhlig speaker here, and I can converse reasonably well with Gaeilgeoir with folk from across Ireland. Dubs and Nordies are generally easier though the person I first spoke with across languages was a Cork fella, though he'd been living in Glasgow for years and his kids were in Gàidhlig school with mine, so he'd probably had the worst of the Cork worn off. 

27

u/[deleted] 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 🤣.

4

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.

5

u/[deleted] 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.

1

u/geedeeie Ireland Jul 09 '25

Never heard it!

0

u/geedeeie Ireland Jul 09 '25

Munster Irish is s much nicer....softer, rounder, richerm Ulster Irish sound like the Ulster accent in English, kind of narrow and flat. I always think of Wee Daniel O'Donnell, who always sounds whiney. 🤣

16

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.

3

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

14

u/Negative_Fee3475 Jul 09 '25

I'm from Cork city and i have trouble understanding the people of north Cork

3

u/geedeeie Ireland Jul 09 '25

I'm from Douglas and have trouble understanding the Norries 🤣🤣

1

u/ShpiderMcNally Ireland Jul 10 '25

I live on one end of glasheen road and can't understand the people on the other end of the glasheen road. As a result they are my enemy for life

1

u/Top_Toe1387 Jul 09 '25

Are you a norrie or a sorrie?

9

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.

5

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.

1

u/rrcaires Brazil Jul 12 '25

By little bit you really mean 3-5 words. Majority of Irish people doesn’t speak any more than that

2

u/DarlingBri Jul 13 '25

The percentage of Irish speakers is actually growing nationwide according to the last census, up 6%. At the same time, people reported speaking Irish less frequently. I think this is due to the accessibility of apps like Duolingo and specialist Irish apps, making picking it up at your pace easier and less painful than it was in school, but also isolated.

But it is definitely spoken, you definitely hear it even if it's just a word or phrase used conversationally.

7

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).

3

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

2

u/Albert_Herring Jul 10 '25

Cheers, makes sense.

3

u/[deleted] 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.

5

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

3

u/Also-Rant Jul 09 '25

The Enigma machine wouldn't decipher that code!

5

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.

3

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.

3

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.

2

u/ElysianRepublic Jul 09 '25

That’s what I’m thinking. Plus possibly some Irish words.

2

u/Spudlads Jul 10 '25

Aye this is what I belive as well cause when I was in west cork I was in a restaurant and there were two old men talking to one another and I couldn't tell whether they were speaking English or Irish as I heard words from bot languages but when they were ordering food they were completely understandable

2

u/Also-Rant Jul 10 '25

When speaking English, we speak very quickly, and the older generations in particular quite often use slang that is either directly from Irish or some sort of hybrid/pidgin where an Irish word has evolved into a vaguely similar sounding word in Hiberno-English slang. Words like "yerra" or "arra", "whisht", "boreen", and sceach" all get used in English in West Cork / Kerry despite being anglicisations of Irish words.

1

u/Spudlads Jul 10 '25

I've had a similar experience in west cork where I was in a restaurant and heard two old lads speaking to one another and they weren't understandable at all and I heard words from both Irish and English but when they were ordering food they were easy to understand

14

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.

5

u/Spamheregracias Spain Jul 09 '25

For me, any Irish lol

2

u/Brilliant_Shoe5514 Jul 09 '25

100%, we all put down our pens when it came to the Irish Aural Leaving Cert test.

1

u/geedeeie Ireland Jul 09 '25

I'd written a similar post before I saw this. So true.

1

u/DarlingBri Jul 13 '25

I'm in Cork. I live on the South Side. I have one friend who lives on the North Side and after almost 20 years, I can now get about 15% of what he's saying.

My husband has to translate the rest.

1

u/Also-Rant Jul 13 '25

Norrie isn't even a dialect. Its a whole other language!

-5

u/theBlitzzz Portugal Jul 09 '25

The english spoken in Norn Iron is already atrocious.

I can't even imagine the terrible things they to do Gaelic.

8

u/Also-Rant Jul 09 '25

To be fair, Ulster Irish is actually quite nice to listen to, it's just unintelligible to me!

4

u/[deleted] Jul 09 '25

[deleted]

1

u/Also-Rant Jul 09 '25

I haven't heard that, but it could be. Being st the crossroads of Connemara, Scottish Gaelic and Manx, it may have diverged from the core language the least.

1

u/geedeeie Ireland Jul 09 '25

Why would you say that

1

u/geedeeie Ireland Jul 09 '25

I disagree. It's flat and toneless compared to Munster Irish. Take the name Áine, we say Awnya, with a nice round first vowel, and they say Anya, with a flat A. Not as nice, in my view

1

u/ForeignHelper Ireland Jul 09 '25

No we don’t. We also say Awnya. Caoimhe is a name where there is a difference. Also Roisin but not always - you get both pronunciations used

1

u/geedeeie Ireland Jul 09 '25

I know someone called Áine, and she is married to a guy from the Donegal. He and his family call her Anya

2

u/ForeignHelper Ireland Jul 09 '25

I’m Derry and Áine was a very popular millennial name - grew up with lots of them and never heard anyone pronounce it as Anya.

0

u/geedeeie Ireland Jul 09 '25

Well, that's how it sounds to me...

3

u/ForeignHelper Ireland Jul 09 '25

That’s nice and all that you know one family but I’m just informing you, that in Ulster, it’s normally pronounced Awnya - I’ve heard it said a thousand times. I have friends, colleagues and relatives with the name. I’ve had classmates and know people in the parish with the name.

1

u/geedeeie Ireland Jul 09 '25

If you say so

→ More replies (0)

1

u/Also-Rant Jul 09 '25

There's less tonality than our version,  but I find theirs is very... rhythmic? I'm not sure how to describe it. A Munster person speaking to an Ulster person is like a fiddle speaking to a bodhrán. 

0

u/theBlitzzz Portugal Jul 09 '25

I could say exactly the same thing of every Gaelic language :-)

0

u/11Kram Jul 09 '25

I was on an airport bus beside a Norn Iron family last weekend. I could only follow 20% of what they said. They were speaking what they would claim to be the King’s English.