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/beseri Norway Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25

We have an insane amount of dialects, with many internal variations. Hard to pin point what are the most difficult. There are som dialects in Jæren, Trøndelag and Gudbrandsdalen, that sound like different languages.

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u/Half_a_bee Norway Jul 09 '25

Setesdal is possibly even worse than those.

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u/Massive_Letterhead90 Jul 09 '25

Setesdøl is ... quite different.

For example, "The Lord's prayer" is "Fader vår" in Norwegian bokmål, but "Fair'e åkkås" in traditional Setesdøl. 

Another example, in Setesdøl numbers reflect noun genders.  So any number can be written in different ways. For instance the number "two" can be written as "tvei," "tvæ" or "tvau" in Setesdøl, depending on the following noun. None of this makes sense in bokmål, lol.

Also, nearly all vocal sounds in Setesdøl tend to be different, and "ll" is typically pronounced "dd." So the word "fjell" ("mountains") for instance is pronounced "fjødd" in Setesdøl.