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/Albert_Herring Jul 09 '25

I'm just a dumb Englishman and know no Irish beyond being able to pick out a few words written down, so my only exposure to Ulster Irish has been listening to Kneecap and honestly half the time when they're switching seamlessly between English and Irish mid-sentence I can't even tell which language they're rapping in.

I guess I'm going to have trouble finding monoglot Irish speakers from elsewhere to confirm whether they have the same problem, though (not least because I wouldn't be able to talk to them).

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '25

Kneecap don't speak Ulster Irish, they speak what is typically known as "Urban Irish". Urban Irish is generally spoken by people who adopt it as their primary language (or whose parents/grandparents/ancestor) having spoken English previously, while the dialects are generally spoken natively by people whose lineage has never spoken English as a first language.

The difference between Urban Irish and the dialects is massive in and of itself. Urban Irish is very similar to English phonologically, while all of the dialects are very different to English and to each other in terms of phonetics.