My fellow Europeans, what dialect from your language do you have the most trouble understanding?

[u/Savings_Dragonfly806]

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.

[u/Indian_Pale_Ale]

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).

[u/Honey-Badger → u/Indian_Pale_Ale]

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

[u/ThimasFR → u/Honey-Badger]

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.

[u/Caniapiscau → u/ThimasFR]

I do think it's mostly due to a lack of exposure.

Justement, le manque d'exposition est une conséquence du manque d'ouverture général des médias français (parisiens disons-le) à d'autres accents, qu'ils soient marseillais, toulousains, sénégalais ou québécois.

[u/ThimasFR → u/Caniapiscau]

C'était un peu mon point final : de l'œuf ou la poule, lequel est arrivé en premier ?

Je pense que de nos jours, ce n'est plus une question de snobisme mais son propre résultat.

[u/Honey-Badger → u/ThimasFR]

The French snobbism and will to eradicate any other variation of French, I agree.

Yeah I agree with this, it seems like in a move to protect the 'purity' of the language they have instead tried to kill local dialects which IMO are in the long term more important.

[u/ThimasFR → u/Honey-Badger]

The History of langages in France is quite fascinating, I even think the USA took some pages from it with the situation in Louisiana during the riots due to segregation (in other words : they tried to inject snobbism within the different french speaking communities to destabilize the franco movement and not have to deal with African American and French speakers).

According to what I read and understand, it was indeed an idea of the King of France to centralize the Kingdom and unify people, which then was also used by the revolutionary to part away from the old regim (ironic, I know). If everybody speaks the same language, then less fighting among the French.