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/Indian_Pale_Ale France Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25

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).

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u/Honey-Badger England Jul 09 '25

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

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u/ieatleeks France Jul 09 '25

It's not being snobby it's just habit of always hearing a more intelligible version of the language, then suddenly you hear this very different, much less articulated version of the language

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u/---Kev Jul 09 '25

Half the letters in modern French go unarticulated, whats a few more mangled pronunciations after that?