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Comment by drstewart | Hacker News Reader

>There are as large regional differences within individual European countries

Have you considered that they're not very large differences and you're just blinded by the fact that you're attuned to them?

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> Have you considered that they're not very large differences and you're just blinded by the fact that you're attuned to them?

Well, let's compare. You could drive for days across America, and hear truly microscopic changes in accent and dialect from one side to the other.

Here in Scotland, I could drive for an hour and hear a totally different accent, two hours would get me to a totally different dialect, and with a six hour drive it's literally a completely different language.

But if you drive north from California for 15 hours you'd end up in Canada, a completely different country with slightly different road markings, Tim Hortons instead of Starbucks, and they even say "about" slightly differently! Take that you Scots!

> But if you drive north from California for 15 hours you'd end up in Canada

... and you'd still be further south than anywhere in the UK :-D

Europe hasn’t had a foreign army invade and kill off almost all of the native population for a very long time. In the US it happened just a few centuries ago. Makes for a much more homogenous culture.

OP here, yes that's the whole point, I'm attuned to the differences. There are two/three countries that I could say I'm fairly attuned to the difference, Sweden (native), the US (lived there for 6 years and we brought up on American culture) and _maybe_ China. In my experience, Sweden is more diverse in terms of dialects, architecture maybe similar, while the US has more natural diversity (obviously) and food. In terms of cultural diversity, both are quite homogeneous in the mainstream white population, and both countries have a large immigrant population, but Sweden's is more recent (30% of Swedes have a foreign background), but the US obviously have a big black population that goes way back.

On the other hand, I'm not very attuned to the differences within e.g. Norway, the UK or Spain, but based on the politics that is visible to me, there are quite stark differences in many European countries and I have no reason to believe they are less diverse than Sweden or the US.

You can debate which are more or less diverse, but you have to admit that they are on the same order of magnitude. The difference between European countries is an order of magnitude or more different that the differences within the US. I can't understand how anyone can argue otherwise.

The difference between e.g. northern and southern Italy is large. Larger than the differences I've seen in the US. I'm from the Netherlands, so I may be suffering from the same issue, but a reason I doubt that is that in many ways Dutch culture is closer to American culture than to Italian culture, so if anything I should be able to detect nuances in US regional differences better.

Unlikely, as foreign visitors invariably point them out uncoached.

I concur. Perhaps must notably, I found that the graffiti on the old stone apartment blocks in Cologne had a certain flair not seen on the old stone apartment blocks in Hamburg.

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