Regional accents in non English speaking countries.

Icecowboy

From my understanding the regional accents can be difficult to understand, what non English speaking country do you think has the "thickest" regional accents?

I'll say Italy.

wazky

Thickest non English speaking accent?, has to be Cork

That can't be English that they are trying to speak.

feargale

Icecowboy wrote: »

From my understanding the regional accents can be difficult to understand, what non English speaking country do you think has the "thickest" regional accents. I'll say Italy.

I don't know what you men by "thick" accents. Maybe you're talking about variation. Yes, Italy has huge dialect variation. I read that at the time of Unification only about 25% of Italians IIRC could speak and understand standard Italian.
The Netherlands has quite a surprising variety of dialects despite being a small, flat country.

pajor

feargale wrote: »

The Netherlands has quite a surprising variety of dialects despite being a small, flat country.

+1.

My Dutch gf can be sitting with her grandparents who will speak the local dialect to each other which she can barely understand, and then switch back to Dutch when talking to her.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

Areas of Normandy have accents difficult for many French people to understand. The occurs in areas of Spain. Indeed it occurs in most languages.

Ficheall

feargale wrote: »

I don't know what you men by "thick" accents. Maybe you're talking about variation. Yes, Italy has huge dialect variation. I read that at the time of Unification only about 25% of Italians IIRC could speak and understand standard Italian.
The Netherlands has quite a surprising variety of dialects despite being a small, flat country.

Dialect isn't really the same as accent, is it?
I always thought that two accents, if written, would be the same, whereas dialects need not?

ErnieBert

Sweden. I met a bunch of Swedish culchies on an island off the coast from Gothenburg.

They were like men from Aran Islands with what could only be described as Swedish red-neck accents. My friends from Gothenburg found it difficult to comprehend them or engage with them.

Royce McCutcheon

Andalucia,particularly around Seville is difficult to comprehend for most Spanish people.They dont seem to pronounce their s's and pronounce their c's as s's if that makes sense! which is fairly hard to get used to when in most other areas of spain they speak quite clearly

biko

Maastricht dialect, lovely
Den Haag, less lovely

wendell borton

pajor wrote: »

+1.

My Dutch gf can be sitting with her grandparents who will speak the local dialect to each other which she can barely understand, and then switch back to Dutch when talking to her.

English is very similar of Friesian, a dutch dialect.

DEFTLEFTHAND

feargale wrote: »

I don't know what you men by "thick" accents. Maybe you're talking about variation. Yes, Italy has huge dialect variation. I read that at the time of Unification only about 25% of Italians IIRC could speak and understand standard Italian.
The Netherlands has quite a surprising variety of dialects despite being a small, flat country.

The likes of Sicilian and Neapolitan for instance are 'Romance languages', distinct from standard Italian to the extent that they could be considered separate. The Italian government however maintains that they're only dialects.

pajor

wendell borton wrote: »

English is very similar of Friesian, a dutch dialect.

Which actually has official status in the Netherlands as a separate language.

jimgoose

Newcastle. Eee, 'oway tha day wor lad! Ah'm gannin yarm noo laahk!

P_1

A chap from Hamburg can have a tricky time understanding what the buxom Bavarian lass he's trying to chat up is saying.

feargale

Intermittent Solarflare wrote: »

I take it you aren't from Ireland if you never heard of "thick" accents before.

I've heard of both accents and "thick." Isn't the latter subjective? Born and bred in Ireland.

Lyaiera

How granular can an accent get? There's an Irish accent, then a Cork accent, then a South Cork City accent, and then there's accents particular to even smaller areas than that. These accents are all recognisable as an accent of a greater region but probably indistinguishable from someone living in an area outside that.

You hear tales of knowing someone's from a particular street in a city because of their accent. And then suddenly these people become great friends because they know they share a common experience. At the same time it doesn't tell anyone not from the area anything, because unless they lived in the area they wouldn't be able to tell it from the broader, more generic accent.

feargale

wazky wrote: »

Thickest non English speaking accent?, has to be Cork

That can't be English that they are trying to speak.

It's said to be the nearest thing in today's world to Shakespearian English, not altogether surprising when you consider that English had its first serious introduction to Munster in the course of the Elizabethan Plantations.

feargale

Ficheall wrote: »

Dialect isn't really the same as accent, is it?
I always thought that two accents, if written, would be the same, whereas dialects need not?

I suppose you're essentially right. Wiki agrees with you anyway. But it's a bit of a vexed issue. When is an accent a dialect? When is a dialect a language?

Banjo String

Australian aborigine tribes in areas a few hundred miles apart have languages as diverse as English and Chinese.

(or once had)

I'm unsure as to how that differs nowadays.

Waitsian

P_1 wrote: »

A chap from Hamburg can have a tricky time understanding what the buxom Bavarian lass he's trying to chat up is saying.

As can a person from Ballymoney talking to someone from Caherciveen I imagine.

dd972

A person on tv speaking in pure Limburg or Friesland dialect often has subtitles in the Netherlands and would be unintelligible to a standard Dutch speaker, more so than any accent variations in English across the U.K / Ireland.