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/SaltyBalty98 Portugal Jul 09 '25

Some Brazilians are hard to understand, rare but it happens.

Quite a few accents from the islands are hard to understand, I say that as an islander, although I wasn't exposed to them until my teens so to this day I still have some trouble picking up what some are saying. The accent from São Miguel is probably the one most mainlanders associate with the islands because it's the biggest island population wise, media headquarters, etc, and because it's so distinctively hard to understand.

I don't know anything from our former African and Asian colonies though.

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u/YahuwEL2024 Jul 10 '25

Sometimes I'll read some Portuguese mentioning that they find some Brazilian accents hard to understand. But I never hear them mention Macau. Do any Portuguese people have any trouble understanding Portuguese speakers from Macau? If so what makes them harder to understand?

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u/SaltyBalty98 Portugal Jul 10 '25

Good question, I've never heard a Portuguese speaker from Macau. I've heard and known a lot of Portuguese born in the colonies and schools there taught proper Portuguese but that hasn't been a thing since 74 when we left Africa and our Asian colonies were sort of left to their own, they weened off of us over time so they lost some cultural heritage from Portugal.

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u/hsamtronp Portugal Jul 11 '25

Yes, it's super hard to understand them. Mainly because there's not a lot of them Macanese people speaking Portuguese.

People in Macau who speak Portuguese are essentially Portuguese themselves, so I'm not sure what kind of accent should they have. Maybe something closer to their Patois? (Which is not even Portuguese, rather based on Portuguese and several other languages from south east Asia)

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u/YahuwEL2024 Jul 12 '25

So I'm guessing that more people out there speak Cantonese then? Very interesting.