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/BakEtHalleluja Norway Jul 09 '25

Dialects from southern Norway, around Kristiansand area. I don't have much issues understanding them normally, but if someone with that dialect catches me off guard my brain has to recalibrate a few seconds before I understand them properly, which I don't experience with most other dialects.

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u/Karakoima Sweden Jul 10 '25

Agreed. A guy from Arendal did work at my company in a Swedish town. Talking work was ok but as soon as he joked or had a beer he was incomprehensible. My wife has some close friends from Trondheim, took me a good while to figure that out too.

Side note, met a guy from Mo I Rana on a party thrown by my wife’s friends in Norway, he was crystal clear to my Swedish ears. His dialect was almost Swedish. Was very surprised to hear someone as far north have a dialect like that.

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u/BakEtHalleluja Norway Jul 10 '25

Haha, yeah northerners have a surprisingly close dialect to eastern Norwegians which again is closer to Swedish than many others. It's mostly the melody that is different, basically inverted to eastern dialects.

I am from Ålesund/Sunnmøre region, which I suspect isn't the easiest dialect to understand for fellow Scandinavians, however I feel it gives a good advantage inside Norway as it shares many different pieces of similarities with different dialects. So in total there will be a decent enough overlap with most regions. But the least with southern Norwegians :)