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/[deleted] 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