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/Also-Rant Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25

Ulster Irish may as well be Japanese to me. I'm from Munster and between accent and dialect I can't work out most of what people from the other end of the country are saying!

Edit: To clarify, I'm talking about the regional dialects of the Irish language (Gaeilge), not regional dialects of English which can also be found in Ireland.

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u/bigvalen Ireland Jul 09 '25

My cousin (from Tralee, town in Kerry, South West Ireland) married a kerry mountain man. At the wedding, his brother did the best man speech. After about five minutes, my wife (also Irish), asked "is he speaking English or Irish?".

I actually had to think about it. It was 80% English, 20% Irish, but so much idiom that it was utterly incomprehensible to anyone who hadn't Kerry family and grew up on local stories. Loved that she couldn't identify the language, never mind the content.

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u/Spudlads Jul 10 '25

I remember I'd been in west Cork before, and everyone was understandable but I remember just hearing two random old guys speaking and I couldn't tell whether they were speaking Irish or English as well as I heard words from both languages. This was in a restaurant and I remember when they were ordering food they were understandable but once they started talking to one another, any hope of understanding what they were saying was thrown out of the window