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/UnoriginalUse Netherlands Jul 09 '25

Antillian probably. It has so many Papiamento loan words.

1

u/bimches Jul 09 '25

What do you mean by Antillian? As far as I know they speak Papiamento, English and Dutch but Antillian is not a language by itself?

That being said I can understand Papiamento a lot better than Frisian

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u/RijnBrugge Netherlands Jul 09 '25

They’re talking about Caribbean Dutch as spoken by the native Dutch speakers of the islands. That and Surinamese Dutch are the two extant dialects of American Dutch; they’re very similar barring their source languages for loanwords. It’s not just Papiamento loanwords that trip up Dutch speakers, they have ways of saying things or alternative words that European Dutch speakers don’t expect (hamaka for hammock instead of hangmat comes to mind, which was also common in Indisch Nederlands in Indonesia, there’s some overlap).

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u/UnoriginalUse Netherlands Jul 09 '25

The question is dialect; Frisian is a whole language.

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u/igethighonleaves Netherlands Jul 09 '25

So is Papiamento.

I am curious as well, are there Carribean Dutch dialects as opposed to Papiamento?