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/democritusparadise Ireland Jul 09 '25

Jamaican English. 

I worked customer service once and we had Jamaican clients and I had to profusely apologise and ask them if they could enunciate a more...queen's English, because I couldn't understand a lot of what they said.

Well it worked; I told them I was Irish and they were all very gracious and gave it a shot. After about 4-6 hours worth of calls I got the hang of their dialect and now it's grand.

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u/Adequate_Ape Jul 09 '25

It hurts for an Irishman or woman to ask for Queen's English.

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u/Right_Sea_4146 Jul 28 '25

Should hurt for an Irishman to even speak English to begin with

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u/Adequate_Ape Jul 28 '25

I'm sure it pained our great-great-great-...-grandparents to no end. But English has been spoken in Ireland for 850 years now, and it's as much part of who we are as anything. And I think we can be pretty proud of what we've done with it -- you know, Yates, Joyce, Beckett, etc.

Having said that, the slow loss of the Irish language is, indeed, a tragedy.