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Comment by bshimmin | Hacker News Reader

Great read. This bit was especially interesting to me:

Still, guess what, nobody has issues understanding one of another region, or even from a Switzerland canton.

I learnt standard Italian (Tuscan) whilst I lived in Bologna, and achieved a reasonable level of fluency - though sadly quite rusty now, a decade later - but I really struggled with regional dialects, especially in Sicily and Venice. It's not just the differences in pronunciation: there are also vocabulary differences.

If it's any consolation, I understand that North Americans find Glaswegian quite challenging, especially when watching "Trainspotting" (eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc3E7UkIzt4).

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As a native speaker of Florentine Tuscan Italian, I often have more trouble understanding other Italian dialects than other Latin-derived languages such as Castilian, Catalan and Portuguese.

My maternal grandmother came from a small town in Abruzzo and nobody could understand her when she was arguing with her sister in their dialect.

The truth is that these "dialects" are indeed completely separate languages evolved from Latin with strong influences from various waves of domination:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy_in_the_Middle_Ages#/medi...

Wikipedia has more details on the present situation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Italy

Of course none of the accents in that clip are supposed to be Glaswegian...they're all meant to be from Edinburgh (though Robert Carlyle was born in Maryhill in Glasgow). For the full Glaswegian effect, try this bit of Rab C Nesbitt, parodying the fact that previous series of this show had been shown subtitled in England

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud9LT7R60kU#t=6m30s

on the other hand we from Glasgow don't seem to have problems understanding accented US stuff (eg The Wire)...I guess because we're brought up on imported TV. The Glasgow accent is nothing though compared to full-on Geordie and Aberdonian dialects, with lots of non-English vocabulary.

Thanks for the correction - it's years since I've seen "Trainspotting" and somehow I relocated it to Glasgow in my mind; that said, Wikipedia helpfully informs that it was actually mostly shot in Glasgow!

"The Wire" is an interesting example since two of the protagonists (McNulty and Bell) are played by English actors (the former an Old Etonian, just like our prime minister!) putting on Baltimore accents; there's even a delightful scene where McNulty attempts a deliberately dreadful English accent.

You are also correct about Geordies - I lived in Newcastle for a number of years and never really understood the locals except by way of sign language.

A Glaswegian here, who learned phonetics for a text-to-speech project. A Glasgow accent actually has the closest correspondence between spelling and pronunciation of any accent of English.

We don't all speak like Rab C. Nesbitt. The reason you might find it difficult to understand some Glaswegians is not so much lack of familiarity with their accent, but because they don't speak Standard English. What you're hearing is a mixture of English and a variety of Scots. Scots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language) is a distinct language, though it's very closely related to English. So when, for example, you hear a word like mair (meaning more), it's not a different accent, it's a different language, just like German mehr or Dutch meer. Glaswegians pronouncing "more" in Standard English don't sound that different from Canadians or most Americans.

You can't in good conscience link to the Wiki page on Scots without linking to version in Scots. :)

https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_leid

That totally makes sense bshimmin, Sicilian is considered a language per-se for example, so it's not very understandable by people talking just Italian and not even a southern Italian dialect at least. But all the schools use Italian language so unless you talk with an 80 years old in Sicily that is not able to talk Italian at all (rare but possible), you can understand easily what people tell you. However within families or colloquially it is possible that most people in small towns use dialects.

That absolutely mirrors my experience - I never spoke to anyone in Sicily or Venice who didn't immediately switch to non-dialect Italian as soon as they realised I was a foreigner (fairly obvious from my fair hair and blue eyes!) who could hopefully just about understand Italian but plainly couldn't understand their dialect. I did once watch a play entirely in Sicilian; it was very beautiful and mostly incomprehensible to me!

But in Sicily there are different dialects of the same mother language, is that right?

Languages/dialects in Italy are complicated!

http://vgsitaliansig.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Language...

Many of them basically evolved from latin on their own, rather than from some kind of standard Italian. Standardization has come later, with TV/radio/travel spreading 'standard' Italian.

For fun, here's "Where did the guy go?" in Italian, followed by some sort of Venetian:

"Dov'e` andato il ragazzo?"

"Dove xeo nda' el toso?"

To see how Sicilian is far away, and considered a separated idiom, the Sicilian translation is illuminating:

"Dov'e` andato il ragazzo" -> "Unna sinni ji' lu carusu?"

Sicilian is a single language that extends even in some part of near regions like Calabria and Puglia (the south parts), it predates Italian a lot, and was one of the main literature schools in ancient times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_School. So from one part to the other of Sicily there are a few different words and accents and there is a division by "groups", but it's pretty much the same thing.

Watching? Reading it is even worse! :D (UK here not American, though.)

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