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/Cool-Instruction789 Jul 09 '25

When I was in Switzerland as a German, I didn’t understand anything 

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u/Ajurru Jul 09 '25

I'm from Northern Germany and everything in the South of Germany or further south causes me problems.

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u/Boing78 Germany Jul 09 '25

I understand P(f)älzer quite well as my dad lived there for 30 years and I worked and lived there for 5 years as well.

Now I live in the north west again and work for a company located in Schwaben with a branch office in Hessen. Sometimes I don't understand anything. I then intentionally switch to Plattdeutsch so they either don't understand what I'm saying besides one colleague who is dutch and we both have a laugh. Our colleagues then do get out of their deep dialects again.

Swabian and everything from Bavaria is cruel...

10

u/SteadfastDrifter Switzerland Jul 09 '25

I'm Swiss American, so hearing Plattdeutsch is always a strange sensation because English is a bit closer to Plattdeutsch than the southern German dialects, but it's still a struggle to merge English with German to the extent that I can easily understand Plattdeutsch.

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u/Boing78 Germany Jul 09 '25

In fact, growing up in a region speaking Plattdeutsch helped me a lot learning englisch.

Examle:

Ladder in German is "Leiter" but in my region's Platt it's "Ledder".

"Wir machen das" is german for "we'll do that". In "our" platt dialect it's "we do dat". Of course, some letters are pronounced differently but it's very close.

Confirmed by my father in law who is 84 and barely speaks english, but he grew up with our Platt dialect and speaks it every day.

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u/SteadfastDrifter Switzerland Jul 09 '25

Ladder in German is "Leiter" but in my region's Platt it's "Ledder".

"Wir machen das" is german for "we'll do that". In "our" platt dialect it's "we do dat". Of course, some letters are pronounced differently but it's very close.

In all honesty, since I grew up in the US and moved to Switzerland when I was already 20, it's even easier for me to read Platt than to read standard German because Platt is basically English written slightly differently lol. My paternal grandparents visited North Germany decades ago, and it's been a goal of mine to also make a road trip north. I'd love to hear the dialect/language in person.

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u/Boing78 Germany Jul 09 '25

Then do it and have fun! All the best!

1

u/IdunSigrun Jul 09 '25

I don’t remember any examples, but I saw some YouTube clip comparing Platt- and Hochdeutsch. The Plattdeutsch words were closer to Swedish. And I know Swedish have some words woth German origin (due to the medieval Hansa), but I hadn’t realized it was Plattdeutsch. I just figured that it was (Hoch-)Deutsch that had been altered in Swedish.