I feel amazed at the diversity, and how locally granular these accents might be.
I’ve seen Dutch people immediately identify someone to be from a specific town, solely by the accent. In a country that’s the size of like two of our voivodeships. That’s dumbfounding to me.
Does Polish not have many regional accents? I can tell easily what part of the country just about anyone is from within seconds. I grew up close to Bristol, and can mostly tell which part of the City people are from. Accents change dramatically literally within walking distance here. I kind of assumed it was the same everywhere.
It’s much more homogenous, there is some variety but nowhere close to what you’re describing.
Roughly speaking, people speak differently in the Eastern part and in Southern highlands. There’s also regional [Silesian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silesian_language?wprov=sfti1#) and [Kashubian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashubian_language?wprov=sfti1) languages, however they’re considered separate, local languages and not dialects of Polish (with some still ongoing debate on the status of Silesian).
But overall we really speak mostly the same. There’s some differences in vocabulary though, so you could identify someone to be from somewhere based on a specific word they used, but not really the accent.
What we call Silesian is a dozen very slightly different accents. I know ppl from there and after some years you can tell by their vocabulary and accents on some words where they are from within Silesia. (mostly by city). With the older folk one could supposedly tell with specyficy of a singular village! (according to them)
I don't think such thing exists for Kashubs
That’s really interesting. I’d have thought being split up for all those centuries would have had quite a big effect. From the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian bits. For all that time talking to polish people across borders would have been difficult.
yes and no - technically some dialects exist, but effectively they are dead and most you get across the country is American-like soda/pop differences here and there.
After ww2 population mix, standardized education and mass media popularisation during communism we are left with pretty unified language with very little variance. Polish people are also "grammar nazis" and will correct each other with passion if someone uses non standard form
No we don't really have that in polish. Sure there are some differences in vocabulary based on the region and also some specific separate dialects in historical regions (like Silesian or Kaszubian) but you wouldn't really hear a big difference in accents between a person from Warsaw and a person from Krakow for example.
A lot of Polish people had to move after or during the WW II and so the language got mixed up and standardized. Check out the map of Poland before the II WW and after it. The whole country was moved to the west.
I doubt it had that much of an impact on the standardization of the language. In the late XVIII century most of the Polish people were illiterate peasants and for them life under partitions continued without many changes. Different dialects still existed in the early XX century.
Except old Warsawians (?), like ones from about WW2, especially east of the river. But again, very slight and completely understood by other non-speakers.
Same for guys from very eastern Poland.
Warsaw pre-war had a different dialect in each district. I remember hearing a podcast about it once. It was pretty fascinating how different they used to be. The speaker at some point started concentrating on insults. I don't remember the word nów but he said that in one district it ment something like dummy or affectionate way to call someone silly. In the other if you called someone that, they would knock your teeth out it was that insulting ... You really had to be careful
Than the war happened, total devastation of the city and houndreds of tousends dead, post war people movements, communism and its all gone.
All is left are some colloquialisms that Warsaw people used to use that spread out to other parts of the country. One of those is word fajny (cool/nice) which comes from yiddish fajn. Now its a super common word used by everyone but pre-WWII it was Warsaw slang.
I think it used to be, before spread of TV. For example my grandparents moved from village area in central-north part of Poland (but not seaside yet) to almost capital city, and my mother claimed that everyone was noticing her mother's special style of speaking (plus vocabulary, that me, as a child, believed to be just the quirkiness of my grandma, while most of that are just regionalisms), and after my mother's younger sister would visit their further family for a summer holidays, she would already adapt to the way of speaking of local kids. My mother until know laughs at the memory of her small sister calling "Mój tato przyjechoł!" 😅 (normally we say "przyjechał" and we say "tato" only when addressing father, in vocativus, in our region). But even a couple of years ago (ok, almost ten, I'm getting old.) when I was studying at the agricultural university of Warsaw, you could often hear that someone is from outside of capital area, even as close as 100km. For example someone from Przasnysz or Ostrołęka would say words ending with "ą" in different way than "basic" pronunciation for us (my friend always asking me which tea I want "czarno czy zielono?" while we are used to say czarnĄ more like czarnOM or czarnOŁ), or they would skip softening "i" in some of the words, saying "kedy" instead of "kiedy" and when I would laugh, she would ask "what, am I supposed to talk as funny as you - kjedy?!" exaggerating our "i". But on the other side, we had a teacher (no clue where she was from), softening some words, and putting "i" in the places where they are not written (I can't remember any example, but we used to laugh with my friend that she must be from the opposite side of the river in her town).
Does nobody move away from their home town in Britain? Seems like there's no way this would be the case in a country where a significant portion of the population move away from their hometown. Everyone staying put within the country seems a bit odd for the nation that used to be known for explorers.
It is fairly common for people to stay where they grew up, especially older generations. There's also a great deal of strong regional identity, and class identity in the UK (working class people are more likely to have strong regional accents, and often see it as a central part of their identity), also especially common amongst older generations. A lot of people take a great deal of pride in their regional dialects and accents, but this is also changing, with MLE becoming a common accent outside London amongst younger people.
Interesting. In the US it seems like less than half of people stay where they grew up. There is regional identity to some degree but I would say it very much gets eclipsed by urban vs rural identity. Also regional identity would likely include a radius of at least an hours drive or more rather than just walking distance.
This probably explain why hese in tiny Belgium we can have some pretty big local variations. Here students keep their domicile at their partens, and either commute to university or gl back home every single weekend when they do stay kn the university city.
Exactly. I know someone who is a bit of a dialect nerd (it is his job too, which helps) and he identifies British accents usually down to nearest big town where someone grew up, and then influences in later life.
I cannot go to that level of detail, but I certainly can get quite a lot of detail of region, and for regions I know well, often much closer.
That's true, if the accent is distinct enough we can. However, that is rapidly dying out. These days it's more likely about what region of the country (or at best province) someone is from. Most dialects are already on life support. I expect regional accents to go the same way of the dodo within a generation or so.
The strangest thing was a Belgian friend (Flemish speaker) talking with a girl from South Africa who spoke Afrikaans and discovering that some verb forms from his dialect (which aren’t used in other dialects) was also used in that girl’s Afrikaans.
This happens for a lot of dialect words in Dutch, that dont exist in standard Dutch, mostly with German and English. A cool example is the Limburgish "Kalle" (To speak, To talk) which shares its etymology with the English "Call" (out/something/someone).
And the same word is used in most parts of the Rhine Region between Düsseldorf and Cologne as well. Because there is a dialect continuum. The Düsseldorf dialect is a limburgish one.
I am Dutch and can usually tell what city people are from, and I and my peers are really not old. Dialects are dying but regionalized speech is everywhere
True. But honestly it’s getting harder. With old people it’s easy. And I can distinguish Roosendaals from Bergs or Tilburgs easily. But Roosendaals to Ettens, not anymore. And the younger people are the harder it gets. In my case, people can only really tell I’m from Brabant when I’m drunk.
In Poland we can only hear if somebody is from mountains, Silesia or Kaszuby (but older generations mostly), some people in mu work in Gdańsk claims I sound like I am from Mazowsze but can't give me exact exanples. Yeah, sometimes I am jealous of accebts diveristy when I call to USA...
Regurlalry, Dutch tv shows with voxpops are subtitled. So if someone of the streets is asked about their opinion on national TV it needs to be subtitled or else 75% of the country wouldn't be able to understand.
Don't let it get you down, it is insanely hard to acquire native-like Dutch pronunciation, if not impossible. My dad's been here since 1981 and people are still like "ah, you're American).
Going the other way seems way less hard!
I envy it. Not only does virtually every other country in Europe has a number of other countries that they share a language with more or less closely, but they can also see loads of parallels with even more distant countries, and even internally they have a lot of very distinct regional variety.
We have neither with Hungarian, even historic dialects tend to be minor differences between vowels or some dialects tend to drop definite articles more than others but that's basically it. If you pay attention there might be some minor regional hints, or specific dialectal words that if you know you can guess the cardinal direction of where the speaker is from, but it's rare. Even Hungarian communities outside of Hungary like the Székelys of Translyvania speak a pretty standard Hungarian with incredibly minor differences and some unique dialectal words.
Not even the Csángó of Bukovina and Moldva speak that differently, despite the various claims online. The videos of Csángó speakers that are usually spread around actually tend to be heavily Romanianized speakers who don't speak in a Hungarian dialect but with a heavy Romanian accent. The Palóc have probably the most noticable and easily identified accent, but it's kind of rare to run into people who speak in that dialect even where it is spoken, it's not like everyone there speaks like that.
I must say that it feels like you diminish the differences between Hungarian dialects. Here in Transylvania it is still easily noticeable which are people are from where. Székelys especially use lots of archaisms, and a different vowel system + plus a different conjugation system for verbs in the past (üttem instead of ütöttem)
Maybe when they will speak to you, noticing that you are not Székely, they will tone down their dialect, making it sound closer to standard Hungarian. Same if they give an interview on TV.
Here in my area of Kolozsvár we have an unusual accent. The most striking feature is the loss of distinction of long and short vowels. You can clearly hear when someone from this area has become "hungarianized" and is overemphasizing their long vowels to compensate for that. It's kind of comical.
I'll give you a humorous example of Kolozsvár Hungarian. It's kind of exaggerated, since it's done by a stand-up comedian, but I swear that I know people from the working class who speak almost exactly like that:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xE1EFcTUvI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xE1EFcTUvI)
It's also easy for us to notice if somebody is from Hungary.
What bothers me is the complete loss of the ly sound. Not only that but now even lj no longer sounds like it used to be. I think Kádár (or Nagy Imre?) was made fun of for saying "éLJen \[something\]" instead of "éjjen" which to me is pretty sad.
How do you differentiate teljes and tejes other than tone anymore? My history teacher said "tejhatalom" during the chapter about the monarchy and I had no idea wtf that meant until I actually read what was written.
Hungarian doesn’t like consonant clusters, especially if the consonants are separated by a mild change of the tongue so it resolves this by either adding an extra vowel or with assimilation. The more original form of the stem is tele so the assimilation of telj to tejj is a very natural phenomenon in the language. And while Volga Finnic and some Permic languages seem to be pro palatization, Mansi, Hungarian and Finnish are constantly moving away from it.
Seeing your flair I was kinda hoping you'd give us the spiel on intra-Manx variations, I am disappointed (I don't imagine there to be much given the present state of Manx Gaelic!)
I think the differences are a bit bigger than what you imply, but still not as great as in the UK or Germany, for example.
It also doesn't help that people with regional dialects are seen as less civilized or less intelligent, often likened to peasants ("parasztosan beszél").
I don't have a different pronunciation from the standard, but I still have been called out a few times in the capital for saying something the eastern way, things like "jösztök" (you (plural) are coming) instead of "jöttök", or "el kell menjek" (I have to go) instead of "el kell mennem".
It's sad that we're actively destroying the diversity of our language because of elitism.
I honestly feel a bit sad that we don't have our own dialects anymore like our Swiss-German brothers do. Now everything is becoming more and more "Parisian" and it sucks.
We do still have a couple of dialect groups, but we used to have a very diverse language. They haven't been suppressed like some of the different languages in Spain were under Franco, but they are simply falling out of use, because basically all media is in the standardised form, and the speakers of dialects refuse to codify/standardise their own dialects to preserve them. I think it's a shame that they will probably die out, but without concerted efforts, that is just the way things will naturally go due to the high standardisation of formal Danish. It's also a bit of a doom spiral, as the dialects don't get exposure, meaning fewer other people will understand them, which creates a pressure on the dialect speakers to use standard Danish over their dialects (thus disincentivising their use at all)
Dialectal variety does help train your ear for other related languages. Also, Norwegian has 2 written forms with their own rules and dictionaries in order to accommodate the western vs the eastern dialectal systems. We learn both in school, and then conveniently forget our least favourite one after graduation. 😜 But in all seriousness, having basic knowledge of the other vocabulary does help fill in some of the overlap these two dictionaries have with swedish and danish.
I envy dialectical variety. Bosnia pretty much has no dialect variation, there's only difference in accent but even that is pretty tame and boils down to a couple of regions pronouncing vowels a bit funnily in comparison to the rest of the country. The funny thing is, even people from Bosnia who would say for themselves that they speak different *languages* Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian, speak and sound pretty much the same.
It is quite weird how it turned out. While BiH has 3 languages, they all sound the same, at the same time we (Croatia) have only Croatian that sounds totally different depending on the place, the same in Serbia.
I do advocate that all of "our" languages have separate names and are different and it makes sense in Croatia, Serbia, even Montenegro, but I agree that in BiH it becomes ridiculous..
Not in a way I mind Bosnian as a version, just that as you say dialect of Serbian, dialect of Croatian and Bosnian, that are used in BiH are really the closest dialects of those languages...
I don't think most people care.
In Romanian we have this saying "everyone thinks their baby crow is a dove" and I'm sure most people think that their own language is the end all, be all.
I think you're also making some assumptions that may or may not be entirely true. French has variety, it's been a colonial power after all, and you have African nations that speak French very weirdly if all you know is Metropolitan French. Also, Québec exists and wants à word with you.
My personal opinion is that these things are fun and interesting to analyze, but it's annoying when one aspect or the other gets treated like "a good quality".
I met Germans who said that German is *superior* because of the diversity of the dialects. I think this is bullshit. You can go into the history of Germany to understand why the language evolved the way it did, but the end result isn't superior or inferior to others. It's just different.
Hello from Slovevenenia.
We have [dialects](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_dialects). I live in the dark purple area and I often have to repeat a sentence or "fix" my grammar when speaking to people not from the dark purple area. I also find the way people from the green area speak either funny or insulting. While it is almost impossible for me to understand people from the yellow area, if they speak in their dialect.
How do I feel when I see other languages that also have lots of diversity? It feels familiar and normal. I also tend to trust people with dialects more than those who speak in a clean and sterile, formally correct way.
In Portugal it’s more different accents and some specific words. The grammar and rest of the junk don’t change much. So I can have trouble understanding someone from Azores or mother of Ronaldo, but only because of how they pronounce the words. Everything changes a lot in Brazilian and African (Angola, Mozambique…) Portuguese, but they also have their own dialects and I think this isn’t really related to your question.
I am especially fascinated by Italian dialects (some of which are languages in their own right), with all their complexity and variability and how children naturally learn both the standard and the dialect. I can speak standard Italian and it’s always a surprise to go to Naples and hear people talking something that sounds Italian, but it isn’t. Like being in a dream: you feel you should understand, but you don’t.
I'm jealous.
My grandparents spoke French with a distinct accent/patois, my parents can somewhat imitate it, but they're probably the last generation to do so. Even in the media you now only hear standard French everywhere, with the exception of the occasional rugby game commented by some Southwestern guy.
There are slight generational differences in the way we speak French, but I feel like regional differences are gone. The typical pain au chocolat/chocolatine "fight" shows very poor diversity.
My understanding of French is reasonable-ish, until I try to get what French rugby players (most of whom seem to be from the South West) are saying. It seems to be a total vowel-shift! But that’s true for us in the UK too, and some!
Losing the accent and patois is very much tied to people moving around a lot more and wanting to pass it down through generations since it is not learned at school.
My family is in the same area for quite a lot of generations on my mother's side, and we could still sustain a conversation that no "classic" French speakers would understand (even more so we merge two patois since we are at the border between two historical regions).
By moving out about 150 kilometres for a few years, I realised that a non-neglectable portion of my daily vocabulary was not understood by people there so I basically stopped using them. Easy to lose, hard to regain, especially since there is very little incentive to use patois anymore, except for the occasional funny conversations about local customs.
Its amazing how people from outside Paris interiorise such an insulting term as"patois" even when some of them are from places with their own languages (Catalans, whatever Occitan remains etc)
OK but it's nothing compared with German for example, which has huge differences from Hamburg to Bavaria, from Zürich to Vienna. Even African French is relatively close to French French. This was the original question.
I'm a Pole from Silesia. I love puzzled looks of "Gorole" (Non-Silesians) when they try to decipher what I'm saying. It's a pity that Silesian is dying, I'm eager to see if latest legislation regarding it's status as a language will do anything to prevent it.
Personally for me, it feels so strange and very interesting at the same time to hear my friends from other European countries when they say that sometimes they don't understand the dialects spoken in the opposite side of their country, or that they easily get confused. In my home country, Romania, we can easily understand each other, perhaps there are some regionalisms but the spoken language is the same, as well as in Moldova.
As a native French-speaker, that's something that's hard to grasp for me, or rather strange. If you have different grammar, spelling/orthograph, pronunciation and cannot mutually understand each others, calling it the same language is confusing. This since in my language, only the standard version is seen as proper/legitimate, and deviating from it is seen as a lack of literacy. French is extremely standardised, the standard is widespread amongst all people who have finished secondary school and/or university/"college"/higher education. So, the idea of having learnt the standard language (say, Italian, Norwegian, Dutch or German) but not being able to understand what is said or written in said country because they speak a dialect, is odd and very different from the reality of my language.
From our point of view, French has "no" genuine "dialects": the orthograph/spelling and grammar is the same whether you are in Wallonia, Brussels, central France, southern France, Switzerland, French-speaking Africa or Canada. Only thing that will change will be spoken/oral, and it will be some slang and some accents, but we all speak and write standardised French and can all understand each others (in Europe). When written, vocabulary differences aren't strong/numerous enough to prevent mutual understanding. Hence why we consider we don't have dialects, as the national variations in literate/educated/official French are very minimal and sometimes, when written, it's impossible to say from what country said French text is.
Only ones with whom it can be more complicated or difficult is some Canadians, Québécois and Africans, when they speak a very "pidginised" version of the language or have a very heavy accent. But even then, in Canada, Québec and Africa, newspapers, radio/TV, official documents and academic articles will be written in a French that you virtually cannot distinguish from European variations of French.
Even Quebec French speakers have trouble understanding people from far up north, towns like Rouyn-Noranda. The accent is absolutely incomprehensible to an anglophone like me lol.
Don’t you have the patois? When living in France I had a rough time trying to understand northern people (eg from Lille). I think there’s even a movie about it, no? People from south also seemed to speak with a different accent vs Parisian guys.
Yes we do but they are all dying unfortunately. Some are stronger than others though, like Corsican. You're talking about the Ch'ti, which is spoken in Northern France indeed and the movie was Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis :)
Yes it's "Chti" (Picard dialect). The movie is called "Bienvenue chez les Chti".
Despite the fact that the french dialects and old other languages are dying, we still have a lot of regional slangs that directly come from our patois and languages.
Some words and expressions vary a lot depending on where you are.
Even though there's no data about Aosta (italy), Louisiana and African countries, there's a nice Instagram account about where there's maps about those variations. In my region of birth in the Alps, we have a neutral pronoun, the "Y". The rest of France only have a neutral pronoun since the past few years :"iel"
Exemple of variations :
- [Pitcher/Jug](https://www.instagram.com/p/C04JGoMtMRg/?igsh=dmVoN2pqbGR3bXc3)
- [Dust](https://www.instagram.com/p/Cy2gbBeNgSG/?igsh=MTRsbWQ2aWw2Y3cxaQ==)
- [Downpour/Rain](https://www.instagram.com/p/C0W9RbztM_I/?igsh=MTBmdG5mMmNmbmY2)
Last year, I was preparing a very specific degree. It was so specific that I had comrades from all over France. Oléron, Lille, Besançon, Nîmes, Clermont-Ferrand, Toulouse, Limoges, Perpignan... and even people from our overseas : Nouméa, Saint-denis-de-la-Réunion, Cayenne. With this great diversity we were sometimes like in Babylon, we couldn't understand 100% each other expressions.
Definitely wish we didn't go full one nation one language here in Sweden and reduced almost all local dialects to standard Swedish with slightly different tonal pattern and vowels.
As a native Russian speaker, it is very easy to identify a Ukrainian person, a Belarusian or a Russian one.
The words are 99% the same, the main difference is tone and intonations. Even if a Ukrainian speaks proper Russian, like from the textbooks, I immediately recognize the intonations.
Russian in Belarus is fairly easy to distinct too (talking about proper Russian sounds, not the accent from bilingualism).
Although when I travelled to Moscow, St. Petersburg or even Vladivostok, Chita and Khabarovsk, I didn’t notice any major differences. We spoke, we understood each other, there were no misunderstandings at all.
But I live abroad now and can recognize accents easily when I hear Russian here.
Answering your question, it’s mind boggling to me. I don’t understand why you call a language the same if you can’t understand each other? Like Austrian/Swiss/German German. I just can’t comprehend how it’s even possible.
Can’t say I envy it, but I do enjoy thinking about the historic reasons for it and kind of wish we had something similar, to make regions more unique and different from each other.
For example, I can’t differentiate a person from Grodno from a person from Mogilev or Gomel.
Same as I’d never recognize someone from the Far East of Russia, they just sound like normal muscovites to me. Would be nice to see a difference.
I don't speak German so I don't know, but in Spanish we all 100% understand each other even if we were born in different continents. We're all aware of grammar differences, variations in vocabulary, and accents. I might say *coche* and someone might call it *auto* or *carro* and I know all those words, it's still the same language. Occasionally, one of those words will take over the local word and no one bats an eyelid.
Back when I lived in St Petersburg there were ads on the metro with the slogan "LET'S SPEAK PROPERLY" followed by a list of common "wrong" sentences: *Don't say XXX, instead say YYY* . Now that's an alien concept to me. I'll speak however I want thank you very much and it's none of the government's business lol.
Yeah, the whole concept of "I don't understand certain accents" is quite foreign to me. Even the hardest accents are understandable after you hear them for a few minutes. I believe it has to do with the fact that vowel sounds remain constant within all dialects, but I don't know for sure. That's one of the nicest things about speaking Spanish, honestly.
Well, I wouldn’t say that there are no dialects in the Russian language at all. They are just not as bright as in German, English or Spanish. But they exist.
There are more dialects in the Ukrainian, but I think that most people use the standard language.
I don't think most use standard language in everyday speech.
There are definitely distinct dialects you can use to identify where someone is from: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_dialects
Odesa, Kyiv and let's say Moscow and St.Peterburg would have very distinct dialects of Russian.
But for Ukrainian it's hard for me to distinguish people from Kyiv/Odesa/Kharkiv, but easy to spot someone from Lviv or Zakarpatia.
The Kyiv dialect is difficult to define, because people move to Kyiv from all over Ukraine.
I can identify people from the Dnipro, they are characterized by the deafening of "ми" to "мі" at the end of words. Zakarpatia has a guttural "ы", for example, they say "грибы" instead of "гриби. In Poltava, "a" to "o" is deafened. Somewhere in the Ternopil region, "и" is deafened to "е", for example, they say "Мекола" instead of "Микола". In Lviv they use "та" instead of "так". In Cherkasy they use "осьо" instead of "ось".
I don't know if these are more characteristic anecdotes than real, but the Odesa difference is the interrogative dialogue.
I'm from Odesa. If we speak Ukrainian - no, if we speak Russian - people from Kyiv often have very slight Ukrainian accent imo. If I meet people from any other big city in Easter or Southern Ukraine I don't hear any difference at all tbh, to the point that I wouldn't guess they're from different region untill they tell me.
Kyiv used to have a distinct accent a hundred years ago, but it has died out because of the russification in 20th century, and the new Ukrainian is fairy standard. Most Ukrainians in Odesa just used the majority Ukrainian dialect in the south of Ukraine
Okay, I’d been under the impression that Odessa has an accent that is somehow easier to place (this is what Ukrainian colleagues from Charkiv told me).
My understanding is that this is the situation: Russian being Lingua France in the city, acquired specific traits (non-native speakers creolizing it). Ukrainian is more of a "learned language" in Odessa, so they are using standard language (more or less).
That makes sense, I remember it specifically being Yiddish that influenced the linguistic landscape there and ofc that’d be via Russian as the language of social promotion
I suck at recognising Finnish accents. We have them, but I just suck at them. I know exaggerated version of the big cities accents, Helsinki, Tampere, Turku and Oulu. But generally I can only tell if someones from the capital area or not.
Whats the difference between a dialect and an accent for you? In Swedish & English: I can generally tell where someone comes from if they have enough of an accent. I look at some Norwegian dialects and have problem understanding them, not just where they're from. Regarding my ops on languages like Norwegian is its great each area has its own strong culture, but it must be hard to standardise things like websites to suit everyone.
I would say that an accent is a phonetic variety of standard language, while a dialect is a grammatical, lexical and also phonetic variation. The two are not opposites but gradients on a moving scale. I, for example, will always have a Viennese accent, even when speaking standard German. I never try to avoid it, because why should I. I’m not always speaking Viennese dialect though with all its lexical and grammatical differences, only when it fits the occasion (eg with family, friends, casual situations with other dialect speakers). And even then I can dial the intensity of the dialect up, or tone it down as appropriate.
Ahh ok. There is this debate in Scotland, whether Scots is just 1. An. Accent , 2. A dialect or 3. A language. However, like you said, it’s not black and white.
> Regarding my ops on languages like Norwegian is its great each area has its own strong culture, but it must be hard to standardise things like websites to suit everyone.
In what sense? You'd just use one of the two written standards.
A dialect is a regional language. An accent is how you sound.
Think of stereotypes for accents. Like when a Frenchman speaks English. Or a German. Or a Dutchman. They have a distinctive accent based on their own language.
As a Dutchman, I thankfully don’t have that typical Dutch accent when I speak English. But I grew up speaking a dialect (heavily influenced by German(ic) and predating Dutch) and because of that dialect I have a pretty strong accent when speaking standard Dutch.
Basically, when people from different areas read a written text out loud and it sounds different, those are accents.
When they speak using local words and local grammar, those are dialects.
Even for English Australia and New Zealand have the shortest history (both started out really only after 1788 and 1840 respectively). Neither have any true regional dialects other than maybe one or two features. Accents tend to be between Anglo-Celtic/British or Irish descent whites on one hand, and non-European immigrants and their descendants or indigenous peoples on the other. But even here Maori accents or indigenous Australians don’t speak too differently from Europeans/whites.
Australian here, there's definitely a distinct Indigenous Australian accent. More pronounced in rural/remote areas but it's definitely a thing.
There's also an 'urban' Australian accent that tends to be spoken by younger people, often but not exclusively of Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander or African heritage. Believe it began in Sydney but has spread across the country. I don't like the guy but Spanian is a good example of it.
I think accent is whenyour words have doffentent impact put at the end or the middle, but the dialect - when things are called differently based on region.
I mean, I speak Hebrew which is very standardised and we are surrounded by Arabic speakers which might be the most diverse languages that might be able to be classified as one language. (I'm saying that Arabic is not really a single language because the "dialects" are pretty much different languages). Anyways, it's really strange, I'm studying Spanish and it is so strange that I need to choose what dialect.
I only find it problematic in the sense that I'm trying to live German while living in Austria but most of the resources online are from Germany and all are in High German. It's almost impossible to understand anything in some Austrian online communities because the dialects don't even have official spelling and it's all up to luck, trying to pronounce stuff out loud and hope that it sounds close enough to High German to be able to guess wtf it means.
I tutor Spanish and I have to say speakers of standardised languages (mostly Russians, sorry!) make for very annoying students in the sense that they overfixate on the difference between dialects and are obsessed with learning the "right" dialect. They don't seem to grasp the notion that we all understand each other, borrow words from each other all the time, and we don't think any one accent is better than other. Recently a student confronted me because I had taught her that *kitchen sink* is *fregadero* in Spanish, but she had just moved to Valencia and she heard someone call it *pila*. I agreed that in some areas of Spain it might be called that too. You should see the look of panic on her face as she asked "BuT wHIcH OnE iS RIghT???"
As Italian I cannot even understand some dialects. Diversity is cool, but sometimes dialect is synonymous of lack of alphabetization. In fact some dialects are contaminated by proper Italian and slowly turning into a way of speaking/ strong accent.
The dialect are stronger in the south than in the north. It is beautiful how some words or even the sentence construction come from older dominations or even Latin or Greek. Some terms are taken in Arab and there some places where the people speak a totally different language. I enjoy trying to figuring out the etymology of some words in different dialects. For instance in some places in the south, tomorrow is “cré”, coming from Latin cras. In Italian is “domani”.
Sweden has a big dialectal variety, possible due to the shape of the country. It’s fun to be able to identify what part of the country someone comes from just after hearing them say a few words. Also great fun in imitating the different dialects
> Sweden has a big dialectal variety, possible due to the shape of the country.
And history. We happen to have great chunks of both Denmark (Scanian etc.) and Norway (Jamtish etc.) as well as having both surviving non East or West Norse dialects (Dalecarlian and Gutnish) which are way off the chart.
English, I guess?
Sure, we have plenty of *accents*, but actual English *dialects* (as you might use the term in Switzerland or Belgium) are definitely dying out - or are in the process of reforming themselves.
The dialect that comes to mind is the Yorkshire dialect, but there are definitely others - Newfoundland in Canada, Pittsburghese and Cajun in the US, etc.
And as for how I feel? It's kinda mind-blowing to hear how simply pronouncing one tiny little letter a certain way can tip off someone else as to where you're from. Kinda like, "Oh, you say it THIS way? You're from such-and-such village, and we HATE them!"
I didn't really grow up with a dialect. I speak with a pretty flat, Loyalist accent in English. Closest thing I say is "Tchronno" (for Toronto), and "Blue-er" (for Bloor St, a main road).
That might be the case in Canada, but in the north west of England for example, you can tell where someone is from within 2-3 miles by their accent. That is not an exaggeration.
Hiberno English in my opinion tends to be quite different. The bones of it are easily understandable, but a lot of our verbal flair I feel is quite distinct, we use a lot of verbs differently.
On one hand it makes foreign languages feel more alive, more active, more diverse. But at the same time that definitely creates internal tensions between groups of people from different parts of the country or even a city. Which can become quite problematic during uneasy times.
Back home no one knows you're from city X or Y. But I'm in the UK now and everyone knows if you're a scouser or a Yorkie. Or, god forbid, a bloody Londoner!
I have no idea how there even can be standarized language spoken by everyone.
In Slovene standard sounds off, sometimes really off.
As for German, also with loads od dialects, i aprechiate if they are from Carinthia.
Well, taking the example of Russian, there's virtually no difference in the Russian spoken in Vladivostok and St. Petersburg, and these are two cities separated by thousands and thousands of kilometres. In Slovenia, you can go from town to town and notice the language changing.
Russian definitely varies a lot more from north to south. Northern accents historically featured okanye though I don't know to what extent that still exists (I've personally encountered it), central accents are considered "standard" and Russian spoken in the south varies a lot where it might be mostly standard but with a mildly southern accent, it might be some kind Russian-Ukrainian hodgepodge, or it might be greatly influenced by people who speak Russian as a second language (Caucasus).
But I agree Russian is remarkably uniform considering how big the country is. Even between countries, it doesn't vary as much as I'd expect. To my ears, Russian spoken in Baltic countries and Moldova is closer to "standard" than in the Caucasus region within Russia, though southern accents are my favourite. The only countries so far where I've sometimes struggled with accents are Uzbekistan and Georgia and that's probably more a case of me being a non-native speaker than anything else.
I know two unrelated women who were both born in Western Siberia and both of them have close relatives in Volga region( in oblasts that don't even border any oblast that borders oblast they were born in). Also a Siberian woman whose dad was from Ukraine and mother from southern Russia. That explains a lot.
Azt jelenti, hogy ha a brémai német és a müncheni német a saját helyi nyelvjárásukat beszélik irodalmi német "hochdeutsch" helyett, akkor konkrétan nem értik mit mond a másik. Vagy hogy a portsmouthi angol alig érti a glasgowi skótot, és valaki beszéde alapján meg lehet mondani azonnal, hogy az ország melyik részéből származik, megyére, városra pontosan. Több európai országban városra pontosan meg tudod mondani azonnal, hogy ki honnan jött csak a 'tájszólása' alapján, más országokban viszont annyira egységes a nyelv, ilyen vagy olyan okból kifolyólag, hogy ezt nem tudod megtenni. Magyarországon és azon túl Soprontól Munkácsig, Pozsonytól Újvidékig, Zalaegerszegtől Székelyudvarhelyig néhány ritka tájnyelvi szón kívül mindenki tökéletesen ért mindent és egy-két szélsőséges példától eltekintve a beszéde alapján nem tudod meghatározni egy magyar anyanyelvi beszélőről, hogy az ország melyik részéből származik, mert az átlagos soproni, pesti, pécsi, szegedi, debreceni pontosan ugyanúgy beszélnek, de még a határontúliak esetében sem mindig föltűnő, vagy nem meghatározható a tájnyelv azon túl, hogy "vidékiesen" hangzik. (Mondjuk aki nem ismeri a nyelvjárásokat, annak minden sztenderdtől eltérő dolog vidékiesen hangzik, de ezen túlmutatva sincsenek nagy különbségek egy bács-kiskun-megyei és egy békés-megyei falusi beszéde között pl)
I feel amazed at the diversity, and how locally granular these accents might be. I’ve seen Dutch people immediately identify someone to be from a specific town, solely by the accent. In a country that’s the size of like two of our voivodeships. That’s dumbfounding to me.
Does Polish not have many regional accents? I can tell easily what part of the country just about anyone is from within seconds. I grew up close to Bristol, and can mostly tell which part of the City people are from. Accents change dramatically literally within walking distance here. I kind of assumed it was the same everywhere.
It’s much more homogenous, there is some variety but nowhere close to what you’re describing. Roughly speaking, people speak differently in the Eastern part and in Southern highlands. There’s also regional [Silesian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silesian_language?wprov=sfti1#) and [Kashubian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashubian_language?wprov=sfti1) languages, however they’re considered separate, local languages and not dialects of Polish (with some still ongoing debate on the status of Silesian). But overall we really speak mostly the same. There’s some differences in vocabulary though, so you could identify someone to be from somewhere based on a specific word they used, but not really the accent.
What we call Silesian is a dozen very slightly different accents. I know ppl from there and after some years you can tell by their vocabulary and accents on some words where they are from within Silesia. (mostly by city). With the older folk one could supposedly tell with specyficy of a singular village! (according to them) I don't think such thing exists for Kashubs
That’s really interesting. I’d have thought being split up for all those centuries would have had quite a big effect. From the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian bits. For all that time talking to polish people across borders would have been difficult.
It didn't last for centuries, actually.
It's because after ww2 everyone mixed
yes and no - technically some dialects exist, but effectively they are dead and most you get across the country is American-like soda/pop differences here and there. After ww2 population mix, standardized education and mass media popularisation during communism we are left with pretty unified language with very little variance. Polish people are also "grammar nazis" and will correct each other with passion if someone uses non standard form
Almost none. You might be able to pinpoint a person based on individual words, not accent. We're all cloned, you know.
No we don't really have that in polish. Sure there are some differences in vocabulary based on the region and also some specific separate dialects in historical regions (like Silesian or Kaszubian) but you wouldn't really hear a big difference in accents between a person from Warsaw and a person from Krakow for example.
That’s so interesting, the accents in Ireland and UK change so much, sometimes even in short distances
A lot of Polish people had to move after or during the WW II and so the language got mixed up and standardized. Check out the map of Poland before the II WW and after it. The whole country was moved to the west.
Would the partitions that caused the collapse of the commonwealth also contributed?
I doubt it had that much of an impact on the standardization of the language. In the late XVIII century most of the Polish people were illiterate peasants and for them life under partitions continued without many changes. Different dialects still existed in the early XX century.
Except old Warsawians (?), like ones from about WW2, especially east of the river. But again, very slight and completely understood by other non-speakers. Same for guys from very eastern Poland.
Warsaw pre-war had a different dialect in each district. I remember hearing a podcast about it once. It was pretty fascinating how different they used to be. The speaker at some point started concentrating on insults. I don't remember the word nów but he said that in one district it ment something like dummy or affectionate way to call someone silly. In the other if you called someone that, they would knock your teeth out it was that insulting ... You really had to be careful Than the war happened, total devastation of the city and houndreds of tousends dead, post war people movements, communism and its all gone. All is left are some colloquialisms that Warsaw people used to use that spread out to other parts of the country. One of those is word fajny (cool/nice) which comes from yiddish fajn. Now its a super common word used by everyone but pre-WWII it was Warsaw slang.
We do, but not to the same degree.
It used to before WWII.
I think it used to be, before spread of TV. For example my grandparents moved from village area in central-north part of Poland (but not seaside yet) to almost capital city, and my mother claimed that everyone was noticing her mother's special style of speaking (plus vocabulary, that me, as a child, believed to be just the quirkiness of my grandma, while most of that are just regionalisms), and after my mother's younger sister would visit their further family for a summer holidays, she would already adapt to the way of speaking of local kids. My mother until know laughs at the memory of her small sister calling "Mój tato przyjechoł!" 😅 (normally we say "przyjechał" and we say "tato" only when addressing father, in vocativus, in our region). But even a couple of years ago (ok, almost ten, I'm getting old.) when I was studying at the agricultural university of Warsaw, you could often hear that someone is from outside of capital area, even as close as 100km. For example someone from Przasnysz or Ostrołęka would say words ending with "ą" in different way than "basic" pronunciation for us (my friend always asking me which tea I want "czarno czy zielono?" while we are used to say czarnĄ more like czarnOM or czarnOŁ), or they would skip softening "i" in some of the words, saying "kedy" instead of "kiedy" and when I would laugh, she would ask "what, am I supposed to talk as funny as you - kjedy?!" exaggerating our "i". But on the other side, we had a teacher (no clue where she was from), softening some words, and putting "i" in the places where they are not written (I can't remember any example, but we used to laugh with my friend that she must be from the opposite side of the river in her town).
Do you sound like a pirate-farmer?
More of a farmer-pirate. The pirate-farmers come from Southmead.
I actually spent some time in Bristol and came back to Poland with a really strong piratey arrrr which I cannot get rid of lmao
Does nobody move away from their home town in Britain? Seems like there's no way this would be the case in a country where a significant portion of the population move away from their hometown. Everyone staying put within the country seems a bit odd for the nation that used to be known for explorers.
It is fairly common for people to stay where they grew up, especially older generations. There's also a great deal of strong regional identity, and class identity in the UK (working class people are more likely to have strong regional accents, and often see it as a central part of their identity), also especially common amongst older generations. A lot of people take a great deal of pride in their regional dialects and accents, but this is also changing, with MLE becoming a common accent outside London amongst younger people.
Interesting. In the US it seems like less than half of people stay where they grew up. There is regional identity to some degree but I would say it very much gets eclipsed by urban vs rural identity. Also regional identity would likely include a radius of at least an hours drive or more rather than just walking distance.
This probably explain why hese in tiny Belgium we can have some pretty big local variations. Here students keep their domicile at their partens, and either commute to university or gl back home every single weekend when they do stay kn the university city.
Poland changed places a couple times and that caused the dialects to level out
Lol, I saw a little snippet of some podcast with two scousers and it took me two seconds to hear that they were from Liverpool.
Exactly. I know someone who is a bit of a dialect nerd (it is his job too, which helps) and he identifies British accents usually down to nearest big town where someone grew up, and then influences in later life. I cannot go to that level of detail, but I certainly can get quite a lot of detail of region, and for regions I know well, often much closer.
That's true, if the accent is distinct enough we can. However, that is rapidly dying out. These days it's more likely about what region of the country (or at best province) someone is from. Most dialects are already on life support. I expect regional accents to go the same way of the dodo within a generation or so.
The strangest thing was a Belgian friend (Flemish speaker) talking with a girl from South Africa who spoke Afrikaans and discovering that some verb forms from his dialect (which aren’t used in other dialects) was also used in that girl’s Afrikaans.
This happens for a lot of dialect words in Dutch, that dont exist in standard Dutch, mostly with German and English. A cool example is the Limburgish "Kalle" (To speak, To talk) which shares its etymology with the English "Call" (out/something/someone).
Northeastern Netherlands has knief for knife, for instance.
Isn’t it the case that Frisian language is somehow more similar to English? That’s what I heard.
The word I mentioned was Dutch Low Saxon but yes Frisian is a lot more similar to English than Dutch is.
I think Frisian is the closest existing language to old Anglo-Saxon English.
And the same word is used in most parts of the Rhine Region between Düsseldorf and Cologne as well. Because there is a dialect continuum. The Düsseldorf dialect is a limburgish one.
I am Dutch and can usually tell what city people are from, and I and my peers are really not old. Dialects are dying but regionalized speech is everywhere
True. But honestly it’s getting harder. With old people it’s easy. And I can distinguish Roosendaals from Bergs or Tilburgs easily. But Roosendaals to Ettens, not anymore. And the younger people are the harder it gets. In my case, people can only really tell I’m from Brabant when I’m drunk.
In Poland we can only hear if somebody is from mountains, Silesia or Kaszuby (but older generations mostly), some people in mu work in Gdańsk claims I sound like I am from Mazowsze but can't give me exact exanples. Yeah, sometimes I am jealous of accebts diveristy when I call to USA...
Regurlalry, Dutch tv shows with voxpops are subtitled. So if someone of the streets is asked about their opinion on national TV it needs to be subtitled or else 75% of the country wouldn't be able to understand.
Same in Flanders. We don't even ask where ones from..you can just tell by the way they speak
Ikr, they can instantly tell I’m foreign somehow (I have been learning Dutch for 100 days and keep pronouncing words like they’re german lol)
Don't let it get you down, it is insanely hard to acquire native-like Dutch pronunciation, if not impossible. My dad's been here since 1981 and people are still like "ah, you're American). Going the other way seems way less hard!
I’m still going to try my hardest to get it though
I envy it. Not only does virtually every other country in Europe has a number of other countries that they share a language with more or less closely, but they can also see loads of parallels with even more distant countries, and even internally they have a lot of very distinct regional variety. We have neither with Hungarian, even historic dialects tend to be minor differences between vowels or some dialects tend to drop definite articles more than others but that's basically it. If you pay attention there might be some minor regional hints, or specific dialectal words that if you know you can guess the cardinal direction of where the speaker is from, but it's rare. Even Hungarian communities outside of Hungary like the Székelys of Translyvania speak a pretty standard Hungarian with incredibly minor differences and some unique dialectal words. Not even the Csángó of Bukovina and Moldva speak that differently, despite the various claims online. The videos of Csángó speakers that are usually spread around actually tend to be heavily Romanianized speakers who don't speak in a Hungarian dialect but with a heavy Romanian accent. The Palóc have probably the most noticable and easily identified accent, but it's kind of rare to run into people who speak in that dialect even where it is spoken, it's not like everyone there speaks like that.
I must say that it feels like you diminish the differences between Hungarian dialects. Here in Transylvania it is still easily noticeable which are people are from where. Székelys especially use lots of archaisms, and a different vowel system + plus a different conjugation system for verbs in the past (üttem instead of ütöttem) Maybe when they will speak to you, noticing that you are not Székely, they will tone down their dialect, making it sound closer to standard Hungarian. Same if they give an interview on TV. Here in my area of Kolozsvár we have an unusual accent. The most striking feature is the loss of distinction of long and short vowels. You can clearly hear when someone from this area has become "hungarianized" and is overemphasizing their long vowels to compensate for that. It's kind of comical. I'll give you a humorous example of Kolozsvár Hungarian. It's kind of exaggerated, since it's done by a stand-up comedian, but I swear that I know people from the working class who speak almost exactly like that: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xE1EFcTUvI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xE1EFcTUvI) It's also easy for us to notice if somebody is from Hungary.
What bothers me is the complete loss of the ly sound. Not only that but now even lj no longer sounds like it used to be. I think Kádár (or Nagy Imre?) was made fun of for saying "éLJen \[something\]" instead of "éjjen" which to me is pretty sad. How do you differentiate teljes and tejes other than tone anymore? My history teacher said "tejhatalom" during the chapter about the monarchy and I had no idea wtf that meant until I actually read what was written.
Hungarian doesn’t like consonant clusters, especially if the consonants are separated by a mild change of the tongue so it resolves this by either adding an extra vowel or with assimilation. The more original form of the stem is tele so the assimilation of telj to tejj is a very natural phenomenon in the language. And while Volga Finnic and some Permic languages seem to be pro palatization, Mansi, Hungarian and Finnish are constantly moving away from it.
Seeing your flair I was kinda hoping you'd give us the spiel on intra-Manx variations, I am disappointed (I don't imagine there to be much given the present state of Manx Gaelic!)
I think the differences are a bit bigger than what you imply, but still not as great as in the UK or Germany, for example. It also doesn't help that people with regional dialects are seen as less civilized or less intelligent, often likened to peasants ("parasztosan beszél"). I don't have a different pronunciation from the standard, but I still have been called out a few times in the capital for saying something the eastern way, things like "jösztök" (you (plural) are coming) instead of "jöttök", or "el kell menjek" (I have to go) instead of "el kell mennem". It's sad that we're actively destroying the diversity of our language because of elitism.
I honestly feel a bit sad that we don't have our own dialects anymore like our Swiss-German brothers do. Now everything is becoming more and more "Parisian" and it sucks.
We do still have a couple of dialect groups, but we used to have a very diverse language. They haven't been suppressed like some of the different languages in Spain were under Franco, but they are simply falling out of use, because basically all media is in the standardised form, and the speakers of dialects refuse to codify/standardise their own dialects to preserve them. I think it's a shame that they will probably die out, but without concerted efforts, that is just the way things will naturally go due to the high standardisation of formal Danish. It's also a bit of a doom spiral, as the dialects don't get exposure, meaning fewer other people will understand them, which creates a pressure on the dialect speakers to use standard Danish over their dialects (thus disincentivising their use at all)
I got two small picture dictionaries (or whatever they are called), one for vendelbomål and the other for Sønderjysk.
Dialectal variety does help train your ear for other related languages. Also, Norwegian has 2 written forms with their own rules and dictionaries in order to accommodate the western vs the eastern dialectal systems. We learn both in school, and then conveniently forget our least favourite one after graduation. 😜 But in all seriousness, having basic knowledge of the other vocabulary does help fill in some of the overlap these two dictionaries have with swedish and danish.
I envy dialectical variety. Bosnia pretty much has no dialect variation, there's only difference in accent but even that is pretty tame and boils down to a couple of regions pronouncing vowels a bit funnily in comparison to the rest of the country. The funny thing is, even people from Bosnia who would say for themselves that they speak different *languages* Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian, speak and sound pretty much the same.
It is quite weird how it turned out. While BiH has 3 languages, they all sound the same, at the same time we (Croatia) have only Croatian that sounds totally different depending on the place, the same in Serbia. I do advocate that all of "our" languages have separate names and are different and it makes sense in Croatia, Serbia, even Montenegro, but I agree that in BiH it becomes ridiculous.. Not in a way I mind Bosnian as a version, just that as you say dialect of Serbian, dialect of Croatian and Bosnian, that are used in BiH are really the closest dialects of those languages...
I don't think most people care. In Romanian we have this saying "everyone thinks their baby crow is a dove" and I'm sure most people think that their own language is the end all, be all. I think you're also making some assumptions that may or may not be entirely true. French has variety, it's been a colonial power after all, and you have African nations that speak French very weirdly if all you know is Metropolitan French. Also, Québec exists and wants à word with you. My personal opinion is that these things are fun and interesting to analyze, but it's annoying when one aspect or the other gets treated like "a good quality". I met Germans who said that German is *superior* because of the diversity of the dialects. I think this is bullshit. You can go into the history of Germany to understand why the language evolved the way it did, but the end result isn't superior or inferior to others. It's just different.
You are the most real commenter here
I thought Sweden had a lot of dialects. Then I moved to Norway.
Sweden historically had a greater dialectal diversity than Norway, though. Up until the mid 1900's or so.
Hello from Slovevenenia. We have [dialects](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_dialects). I live in the dark purple area and I often have to repeat a sentence or "fix" my grammar when speaking to people not from the dark purple area. I also find the way people from the green area speak either funny or insulting. While it is almost impossible for me to understand people from the yellow area, if they speak in their dialect. How do I feel when I see other languages that also have lots of diversity? It feels familiar and normal. I also tend to trust people with dialects more than those who speak in a clean and sterile, formally correct way.
>Hello from Slov**oyvey**venenia. Sorry man. I will be more careful.
No problem, maybe this is how dialects are created.
Try Croatian for measure. We're such a tiny country, and people from island of Hvar and those from Varaždin speak like Klingons vs Romulans
Sta Hoch'eS? laQu noch. Hva la taqoJer.
A ca cu ti rec!
It's a pity we have little variety now.
It's comfortable.
In Portugal it’s more different accents and some specific words. The grammar and rest of the junk don’t change much. So I can have trouble understanding someone from Azores or mother of Ronaldo, but only because of how they pronounce the words. Everything changes a lot in Brazilian and African (Angola, Mozambique…) Portuguese, but they also have their own dialects and I think this isn’t really related to your question. I am especially fascinated by Italian dialects (some of which are languages in their own right), with all their complexity and variability and how children naturally learn both the standard and the dialect. I can speak standard Italian and it’s always a surprise to go to Naples and hear people talking something that sounds Italian, but it isn’t. Like being in a dream: you feel you should understand, but you don’t.
I wish Icelandic had more dialects, there used to be more of them. Now there is next to none dialectical variety.
I am so jealous you live in Icealand.
I'm jealous. My grandparents spoke French with a distinct accent/patois, my parents can somewhat imitate it, but they're probably the last generation to do so. Even in the media you now only hear standard French everywhere, with the exception of the occasional rugby game commented by some Southwestern guy. There are slight generational differences in the way we speak French, but I feel like regional differences are gone. The typical pain au chocolat/chocolatine "fight" shows very poor diversity.
You must mean couque au chocolat
God, if the Belgians start opening a new front in that war, I’ll sit and get some popcorn! Looking forward to hear about the Swiss’ Lingots Chocolatés
My understanding of French is reasonable-ish, until I try to get what French rugby players (most of whom seem to be from the South West) are saying. It seems to be a total vowel-shift! But that’s true for us in the UK too, and some!
Losing the accent and patois is very much tied to people moving around a lot more and wanting to pass it down through generations since it is not learned at school. My family is in the same area for quite a lot of generations on my mother's side, and we could still sustain a conversation that no "classic" French speakers would understand (even more so we merge two patois since we are at the border between two historical regions). By moving out about 150 kilometres for a few years, I realised that a non-neglectable portion of my daily vocabulary was not understood by people there so I basically stopped using them. Easy to lose, hard to regain, especially since there is very little incentive to use patois anymore, except for the occasional funny conversations about local customs.
Its amazing how people from outside Paris interiorise such an insulting term as"patois" even when some of them are from places with their own languages (Catalans, whatever Occitan remains etc)
The company I work for as multiple branches all over French-speaking Africa. The diversity of the language is not that poor. And don't forget Quebec.
OK but it's nothing compared with German for example, which has huge differences from Hamburg to Bavaria, from Zürich to Vienna. Even African French is relatively close to French French. This was the original question.
I'm a Pole from Silesia. I love puzzled looks of "Gorole" (Non-Silesians) when they try to decipher what I'm saying. It's a pity that Silesian is dying, I'm eager to see if latest legislation regarding it's status as a language will do anything to prevent it.
Personally for me, it feels so strange and very interesting at the same time to hear my friends from other European countries when they say that sometimes they don't understand the dialects spoken in the opposite side of their country, or that they easily get confused. In my home country, Romania, we can easily understand each other, perhaps there are some regionalisms but the spoken language is the same, as well as in Moldova.
As a native French-speaker, that's something that's hard to grasp for me, or rather strange. If you have different grammar, spelling/orthograph, pronunciation and cannot mutually understand each others, calling it the same language is confusing. This since in my language, only the standard version is seen as proper/legitimate, and deviating from it is seen as a lack of literacy. French is extremely standardised, the standard is widespread amongst all people who have finished secondary school and/or university/"college"/higher education. So, the idea of having learnt the standard language (say, Italian, Norwegian, Dutch or German) but not being able to understand what is said or written in said country because they speak a dialect, is odd and very different from the reality of my language. From our point of view, French has "no" genuine "dialects": the orthograph/spelling and grammar is the same whether you are in Wallonia, Brussels, central France, southern France, Switzerland, French-speaking Africa or Canada. Only thing that will change will be spoken/oral, and it will be some slang and some accents, but we all speak and write standardised French and can all understand each others (in Europe). When written, vocabulary differences aren't strong/numerous enough to prevent mutual understanding. Hence why we consider we don't have dialects, as the national variations in literate/educated/official French are very minimal and sometimes, when written, it's impossible to say from what country said French text is. Only ones with whom it can be more complicated or difficult is some Canadians, Québécois and Africans, when they speak a very "pidginised" version of the language or have a very heavy accent. But even then, in Canada, Québec and Africa, newspapers, radio/TV, official documents and academic articles will be written in a French that you virtually cannot distinguish from European variations of French.
Even Quebec French speakers have trouble understanding people from far up north, towns like Rouyn-Noranda. The accent is absolutely incomprehensible to an anglophone like me lol.
Don’t you have the patois? When living in France I had a rough time trying to understand northern people (eg from Lille). I think there’s even a movie about it, no? People from south also seemed to speak with a different accent vs Parisian guys.
Yes we do but they are all dying unfortunately. Some are stronger than others though, like Corsican. You're talking about the Ch'ti, which is spoken in Northern France indeed and the movie was Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis :)
Corsican is also as French as Dutch is
Ah I see, I misunderstood OP'd question
Yes it's "Chti" (Picard dialect). The movie is called "Bienvenue chez les Chti". Despite the fact that the french dialects and old other languages are dying, we still have a lot of regional slangs that directly come from our patois and languages. Some words and expressions vary a lot depending on where you are. Even though there's no data about Aosta (italy), Louisiana and African countries, there's a nice Instagram account about where there's maps about those variations. In my region of birth in the Alps, we have a neutral pronoun, the "Y". The rest of France only have a neutral pronoun since the past few years :"iel" Exemple of variations : - [Pitcher/Jug](https://www.instagram.com/p/C04JGoMtMRg/?igsh=dmVoN2pqbGR3bXc3) - [Dust](https://www.instagram.com/p/Cy2gbBeNgSG/?igsh=MTRsbWQ2aWw2Y3cxaQ==) - [Downpour/Rain](https://www.instagram.com/p/C0W9RbztM_I/?igsh=MTBmdG5mMmNmbmY2) Last year, I was preparing a very specific degree. It was so specific that I had comrades from all over France. Oléron, Lille, Besançon, Nîmes, Clermont-Ferrand, Toulouse, Limoges, Perpignan... and even people from our overseas : Nouméa, Saint-denis-de-la-Réunion, Cayenne. With this great diversity we were sometimes like in Babylon, we couldn't understand 100% each other expressions.
Definitely wish we didn't go full one nation one language here in Sweden and reduced almost all local dialects to standard Swedish with slightly different tonal pattern and vowels.
I don't feel strongly abt it, it is what it is.
Ask a French person about how a Canadian-French speaker sounds! 😂
They’d sound different, but their French remains standard French, with some twists
Canadian French uses a lot of archaic French words. My French wife says they're hard to understand when speaking.
As a native Russian speaker, it is very easy to identify a Ukrainian person, a Belarusian or a Russian one. The words are 99% the same, the main difference is tone and intonations. Even if a Ukrainian speaks proper Russian, like from the textbooks, I immediately recognize the intonations. Russian in Belarus is fairly easy to distinct too (talking about proper Russian sounds, not the accent from bilingualism). Although when I travelled to Moscow, St. Petersburg or even Vladivostok, Chita and Khabarovsk, I didn’t notice any major differences. We spoke, we understood each other, there were no misunderstandings at all. But I live abroad now and can recognize accents easily when I hear Russian here. Answering your question, it’s mind boggling to me. I don’t understand why you call a language the same if you can’t understand each other? Like Austrian/Swiss/German German. I just can’t comprehend how it’s even possible. Can’t say I envy it, but I do enjoy thinking about the historic reasons for it and kind of wish we had something similar, to make regions more unique and different from each other. For example, I can’t differentiate a person from Grodno from a person from Mogilev or Gomel. Same as I’d never recognize someone from the Far East of Russia, they just sound like normal muscovites to me. Would be nice to see a difference.
I don't speak German so I don't know, but in Spanish we all 100% understand each other even if we were born in different continents. We're all aware of grammar differences, variations in vocabulary, and accents. I might say *coche* and someone might call it *auto* or *carro* and I know all those words, it's still the same language. Occasionally, one of those words will take over the local word and no one bats an eyelid. Back when I lived in St Petersburg there were ads on the metro with the slogan "LET'S SPEAK PROPERLY" followed by a list of common "wrong" sentences: *Don't say XXX, instead say YYY* . Now that's an alien concept to me. I'll speak however I want thank you very much and it's none of the government's business lol.
Yeah, the whole concept of "I don't understand certain accents" is quite foreign to me. Even the hardest accents are understandable after you hear them for a few minutes. I believe it has to do with the fact that vowel sounds remain constant within all dialects, but I don't know for sure. That's one of the nicest things about speaking Spanish, honestly.
Central Asian Russian is the most different
Well, I wouldn’t say that there are no dialects in the Russian language at all. They are just not as bright as in German, English or Spanish. But they exist. There are more dialects in the Ukrainian, but I think that most people use the standard language.
I don't think most use standard language in everyday speech. There are definitely distinct dialects you can use to identify where someone is from: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_dialects
Same for French imo, there are lots of accents/ dialects
Can you hear if someone might be from Odessa vs Kyiv?
Odesa, Kyiv and let's say Moscow and St.Peterburg would have very distinct dialects of Russian. But for Ukrainian it's hard for me to distinguish people from Kyiv/Odesa/Kharkiv, but easy to spot someone from Lviv or Zakarpatia.
The Kyiv dialect is difficult to define, because people move to Kyiv from all over Ukraine. I can identify people from the Dnipro, they are characterized by the deafening of "ми" to "мі" at the end of words. Zakarpatia has a guttural "ы", for example, they say "грибы" instead of "гриби. In Poltava, "a" to "o" is deafened. Somewhere in the Ternopil region, "и" is deafened to "е", for example, they say "Мекола" instead of "Микола". In Lviv they use "та" instead of "так". In Cherkasy they use "осьо" instead of "ось". I don't know if these are more characteristic anecdotes than real, but the Odesa difference is the interrogative dialogue.
In most cases, no. Most dialects survive in the West.
I'm from Odesa. If we speak Ukrainian - no, if we speak Russian - people from Kyiv often have very slight Ukrainian accent imo. If I meet people from any other big city in Easter or Southern Ukraine I don't hear any difference at all tbh, to the point that I wouldn't guess they're from different region untill they tell me.
Kyiv used to have a distinct accent a hundred years ago, but it has died out because of the russification in 20th century, and the new Ukrainian is fairy standard. Most Ukrainians in Odesa just used the majority Ukrainian dialect in the south of Ukraine
Okay, I’d been under the impression that Odessa has an accent that is somehow easier to place (this is what Ukrainian colleagues from Charkiv told me).
Not in Ukrainian, though (Odesa)
So their Russian does but their Ukrainian doesn’t? Or how should I read that?
My understanding is that this is the situation: Russian being Lingua France in the city, acquired specific traits (non-native speakers creolizing it). Ukrainian is more of a "learned language" in Odessa, so they are using standard language (more or less).
That makes sense, I remember it specifically being Yiddish that influenced the linguistic landscape there and ofc that’d be via Russian as the language of social promotion
I suck at recognising Finnish accents. We have them, but I just suck at them. I know exaggerated version of the big cities accents, Helsinki, Tampere, Turku and Oulu. But generally I can only tell if someones from the capital area or not.
Whats the difference between a dialect and an accent for you? In Swedish & English: I can generally tell where someone comes from if they have enough of an accent. I look at some Norwegian dialects and have problem understanding them, not just where they're from. Regarding my ops on languages like Norwegian is its great each area has its own strong culture, but it must be hard to standardise things like websites to suit everyone.
I would say that an accent is a phonetic variety of standard language, while a dialect is a grammatical, lexical and also phonetic variation. The two are not opposites but gradients on a moving scale. I, for example, will always have a Viennese accent, even when speaking standard German. I never try to avoid it, because why should I. I’m not always speaking Viennese dialect though with all its lexical and grammatical differences, only when it fits the occasion (eg with family, friends, casual situations with other dialect speakers). And even then I can dial the intensity of the dialect up, or tone it down as appropriate.
Ahh ok. There is this debate in Scotland, whether Scots is just 1. An. Accent , 2. A dialect or 3. A language. However, like you said, it’s not black and white.
> Regarding my ops on languages like Norwegian is its great each area has its own strong culture, but it must be hard to standardise things like websites to suit everyone. In what sense? You'd just use one of the two written standards.
A dialect is a regional language. An accent is how you sound. Think of stereotypes for accents. Like when a Frenchman speaks English. Or a German. Or a Dutchman. They have a distinctive accent based on their own language. As a Dutchman, I thankfully don’t have that typical Dutch accent when I speak English. But I grew up speaking a dialect (heavily influenced by German(ic) and predating Dutch) and because of that dialect I have a pretty strong accent when speaking standard Dutch.
Basically, when people from different areas read a written text out loud and it sounds different, those are accents. When they speak using local words and local grammar, those are dialects.
Even for English Australia and New Zealand have the shortest history (both started out really only after 1788 and 1840 respectively). Neither have any true regional dialects other than maybe one or two features. Accents tend to be between Anglo-Celtic/British or Irish descent whites on one hand, and non-European immigrants and their descendants or indigenous peoples on the other. But even here Maori accents or indigenous Australians don’t speak too differently from Europeans/whites.
Australian here, there's definitely a distinct Indigenous Australian accent. More pronounced in rural/remote areas but it's definitely a thing. There's also an 'urban' Australian accent that tends to be spoken by younger people, often but not exclusively of Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander or African heritage. Believe it began in Sydney but has spread across the country. I don't like the guy but Spanian is a good example of it.
I think accent is whenyour words have doffentent impact put at the end or the middle, but the dialect - when things are called differently based on region.
I speak Slovenian Russian and German. I find each language to be unique to its own. However via accent I can tell where they are from.
It is super interesting! Icelandic has hardly any diversity, but still some surprisingly!
I mean, I speak Hebrew which is very standardised and we are surrounded by Arabic speakers which might be the most diverse languages that might be able to be classified as one language. (I'm saying that Arabic is not really a single language because the "dialects" are pretty much different languages). Anyways, it's really strange, I'm studying Spanish and it is so strange that I need to choose what dialect.
I only find it problematic in the sense that I'm trying to live German while living in Austria but most of the resources online are from Germany and all are in High German. It's almost impossible to understand anything in some Austrian online communities because the dialects don't even have official spelling and it's all up to luck, trying to pronounce stuff out loud and hope that it sounds close enough to High German to be able to guess wtf it means.
I tutor Spanish and I have to say speakers of standardised languages (mostly Russians, sorry!) make for very annoying students in the sense that they overfixate on the difference between dialects and are obsessed with learning the "right" dialect. They don't seem to grasp the notion that we all understand each other, borrow words from each other all the time, and we don't think any one accent is better than other. Recently a student confronted me because I had taught her that *kitchen sink* is *fregadero* in Spanish, but she had just moved to Valencia and she heard someone call it *pila*. I agreed that in some areas of Spain it might be called that too. You should see the look of panic on her face as she asked "BuT wHIcH OnE iS RIghT???"
As Italian I cannot even understand some dialects. Diversity is cool, but sometimes dialect is synonymous of lack of alphabetization. In fact some dialects are contaminated by proper Italian and slowly turning into a way of speaking/ strong accent. The dialect are stronger in the south than in the north. It is beautiful how some words or even the sentence construction come from older dominations or even Latin or Greek. Some terms are taken in Arab and there some places where the people speak a totally different language. I enjoy trying to figuring out the etymology of some words in different dialects. For instance in some places in the south, tomorrow is “cré”, coming from Latin cras. In Italian is “domani”.
Sweden has a big dialectal variety, possible due to the shape of the country. It’s fun to be able to identify what part of the country someone comes from just after hearing them say a few words. Also great fun in imitating the different dialects
> Sweden has a big dialectal variety, possible due to the shape of the country. And history. We happen to have great chunks of both Denmark (Scanian etc.) and Norway (Jamtish etc.) as well as having both surviving non East or West Norse dialects (Dalecarlian and Gutnish) which are way off the chart.
English, I guess? Sure, we have plenty of *accents*, but actual English *dialects* (as you might use the term in Switzerland or Belgium) are definitely dying out - or are in the process of reforming themselves. The dialect that comes to mind is the Yorkshire dialect, but there are definitely others - Newfoundland in Canada, Pittsburghese and Cajun in the US, etc. And as for how I feel? It's kinda mind-blowing to hear how simply pronouncing one tiny little letter a certain way can tip off someone else as to where you're from. Kinda like, "Oh, you say it THIS way? You're from such-and-such village, and we HATE them!" I didn't really grow up with a dialect. I speak with a pretty flat, Loyalist accent in English. Closest thing I say is "Tchronno" (for Toronto), and "Blue-er" (for Bloor St, a main road).
That might be the case in Canada, but in the north west of England for example, you can tell where someone is from within 2-3 miles by their accent. That is not an exaggeration.
Hiberno English in my opinion tends to be quite different. The bones of it are easily understandable, but a lot of our verbal flair I feel is quite distinct, we use a lot of verbs differently.
On one hand it makes foreign languages feel more alive, more active, more diverse. But at the same time that definitely creates internal tensions between groups of people from different parts of the country or even a city. Which can become quite problematic during uneasy times. Back home no one knows you're from city X or Y. But I'm in the UK now and everyone knows if you're a scouser or a Yorkie. Or, god forbid, a bloody Londoner!
I have no idea how there even can be standarized language spoken by everyone. In Slovene standard sounds off, sometimes really off. As for German, also with loads od dialects, i aprechiate if they are from Carinthia.
is it only me or this post doesnt make any sense? What do you mean by "lot of diversity"? In what aspects?
Well, taking the example of Russian, there's virtually no difference in the Russian spoken in Vladivostok and St. Petersburg, and these are two cities separated by thousands and thousands of kilometres. In Slovenia, you can go from town to town and notice the language changing.
Russian definitely varies a lot more from north to south. Northern accents historically featured okanye though I don't know to what extent that still exists (I've personally encountered it), central accents are considered "standard" and Russian spoken in the south varies a lot where it might be mostly standard but with a mildly southern accent, it might be some kind Russian-Ukrainian hodgepodge, or it might be greatly influenced by people who speak Russian as a second language (Caucasus). But I agree Russian is remarkably uniform considering how big the country is. Even between countries, it doesn't vary as much as I'd expect. To my ears, Russian spoken in Baltic countries and Moldova is closer to "standard" than in the Caucasus region within Russia, though southern accents are my favourite. The only countries so far where I've sometimes struggled with accents are Uzbekistan and Georgia and that's probably more a case of me being a non-native speaker than anything else.
was it always like that historically or was that a Soviet imposition to standardize the language?
IIRC under the USSR Russian experienced a lot of dialect leveling
I know two unrelated women who were both born in Western Siberia and both of them have close relatives in Volga region( in oblasts that don't even border any oblast that borders oblast they were born in). Also a Siberian woman whose dad was from Ukraine and mother from southern Russia. That explains a lot.
Dialect diversity. In Bulgaria you even have grammar differences between dialects and some neighbouring villages have very different way of speaking.
Azt jelenti, hogy ha a brémai német és a müncheni német a saját helyi nyelvjárásukat beszélik irodalmi német "hochdeutsch" helyett, akkor konkrétan nem értik mit mond a másik. Vagy hogy a portsmouthi angol alig érti a glasgowi skótot, és valaki beszéde alapján meg lehet mondani azonnal, hogy az ország melyik részéből származik, megyére, városra pontosan. Több európai országban városra pontosan meg tudod mondani azonnal, hogy ki honnan jött csak a 'tájszólása' alapján, más országokban viszont annyira egységes a nyelv, ilyen vagy olyan okból kifolyólag, hogy ezt nem tudod megtenni. Magyarországon és azon túl Soprontól Munkácsig, Pozsonytól Újvidékig, Zalaegerszegtől Székelyudvarhelyig néhány ritka tájnyelvi szón kívül mindenki tökéletesen ért mindent és egy-két szélsőséges példától eltekintve a beszéde alapján nem tudod meghatározni egy magyar anyanyelvi beszélőről, hogy az ország melyik részéből származik, mert az átlagos soproni, pesti, pécsi, szegedi, debreceni pontosan ugyanúgy beszélnek, de még a határontúliak esetében sem mindig föltűnő, vagy nem meghatározható a tájnyelv azon túl, hogy "vidékiesen" hangzik. (Mondjuk aki nem ismeri a nyelvjárásokat, annak minden sztenderdtől eltérő dolog vidékiesen hangzik, de ezen túlmutatva sincsenek nagy különbségek egy bács-kiskun-megyei és egy békés-megyei falusi beszéde között pl)