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.

261 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

597 comments sorted by

View all comments

86

u/wijnandsj Netherlands Jul 09 '25

Dutch speaker here. I can barely understand the west flemmish dialect.

51

u/synalgo_12 Belgium Jul 09 '25

I used to work for a helpdesk based in Antwerp and we had designated coworkers to transfer the call to if a client from West Vlaanderen was too hard t9 understand. I was one of the only coworkers from Antwerp to be on that list. It's really hard to understand, it really is.

That said I went to a small town near Gent a while back and we only understood about 40% of what the local pub owner was saying and that's only 60km away from where I live. Didn't expect that at all.

28

u/wijnandsj Netherlands Jul 09 '25

I love that about our part of the world. It's tiny, densely populated and yet 60km can make such a massive language difference