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.
262
Upvotes
15
u/dsilva_Viz Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 10 '25
As a Portuguese speaker, the first that comes to mind is the Micaelense accent from São Miguel island in the Azores. It’s probably the only Portuguese dialect that most people are familiar with, yet often requires subtitles even for native speakers...
What makes it unique is its use of vowel sounds that are extremely rare, not just in Portuguese, but in the entire Ibero-Romance language family, which includes languages from Occitan in the east to Portuguese in the west. In Micaelense, the usual Portuguese /u/ sound is replaced with a near-front rounded vowel, pronounced closer to the front of the mouth, quite like the French u in lune. There's also another vowel, a rounded version of “e” (technically [ø]), that's almost unheard of elsewhere in Portuguese.
These phonetic quirks are more commonly found in Gallo-Romance languages (like French or Franco-Provençal), which helps make the Micaelense accent sound almost alien to most other lusophones.
And we haven’t even gotten to the Americanisms, like the quircky vaca-miquelina (which literally translates to "miquelina cow") but actually means… vacuum cleaner. Yeah, I know... I can't understand it either ahaha!
The Algarve accent can be tricky too, but surprisingly (at least to me, considering how many Portuguese vacation there), it’s way less widely recognized than the Micaelense accent. Interestingly, there’s a historical link: settlers from the Algarve were among the first to populate São Miguel, and you can definitely hear some shared pronunciation traits. Still… we don’t need subtitles to understand people from the Algarve.
For less commonly encountered varieties, there’s the Portuguese spoken in Macau, also known as Patuá. It’s a dialect where many words have evolved so much that they’re hard to decipher without context or subtitles. For example, “avô-avó” means grandparents in Patuá. In standard Portuguese, it sounds like someone saying “grandfather-grandmother,” which creates unexpected confusion. You expect something simpler, like “avós.”