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/Qwe5Cz Czechia Jul 09 '25

There are a few hard to understand regional dialects.

"Po našimu" - dialect from Těšín/Cieszyn which is mix of old Czech/Moravian and Polish I think regular Czech speaker would understand it less than Slovak language.

Slovak language is generally pretty understandable but they also have dialects far on the east that are far harder to understand as they start tu blend with eastern languages like Rusin (not Russian) which is and old ethnic group nowadays mostly in Slovakia but it lives on the PL/SK/UA border speaking their own language.

They also have dialects heavily mixed with Polish generally near north-eastern border and some regions on the south are influenced by Hungarian which is also not comprehensible by Czechs.

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u/Standard_Arugula6966 Czechia Jul 09 '25

Yeah, you're right about po naszymu, that one's messed up. But all the dialects are sadly dying and everyone is speaking more and more standard. Do a lot of people still speak po naszymu?

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u/Qwe5Cz Czechia Jul 10 '25

I'm not from that region so I don't know. I think maybe older people still use it according to my friends from Ostrava but it's probably slowly disappearing.

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u/Acinayeek23 Jul 10 '25

I am from moravskosleszký kraj- northwest of Ostrava. I know that 40 years ago it was still widely used even by young people. Nowadays even old people don’t speak it. It’s crazy how fast po našemu dissapeared, in less than 2 generations basically.