Beat me to it!
Anyway, I would have to nominate the accent used by the farmer informant in Hot Fuzz. Its incomprehensibility was probably dramatized, but I bet it’s based on a real English dialect.
They’re speaking the Queen’s English as compared to the Gullah, whose language is pretty far gone from English. Actually, maybe it isn’t English at all. I doubt any English-speaking person could understand it.
I’ve never seen an American film with subtitles, but a lot of these urban US accents are not easy to follow.
I once heard Patrick Stewart on a radio show. He briefly spoke with an accent he said he used with his friends when he was a teenager, and I couldn’t understand a word of it.
I believe he had a Yorkshire accent. Some of those can be hard to understand. IIRC, he took elocution lessons or something, since he wanted to be a RADA/Shakespearian actor.
Geordie.
I go to Sotland every few years as I love the place. The accents are remarkable. But I never found them harder to understand than say a lass in Limerick (Ireland).
I can’t really understand the Geordie poem either, but that appears to contain a lot of dialect. Which dialect, according to Geordie intellectual Melvyn Bragg, comes from the norse invaders. He recounted in a documentary about being in a posh restaurant in Oslo and hearing a well-dressed woman at the next table say something like “Am gannin hwam”, which he said was exactly the same as “street” Geordie for “I’m going home”.
I’d just like to register a little grammar-fascist nitpick here - the thread title contains a redundanct negative, and should surely read “Least intelligible english accent” (shouldn’t it?)
I’ve got little problem with the poem, but I do have to listen properly. That’s because the difficulty has moved from accent (the guy only has a mild one) to the language, and understanding an unfamiliar dialect such as in this case involves a great deal of real-time interpretation through context. Which is no different to when reading something written using a dialect:
We twa hae run about the braes,
and pu’d the gowans fine ;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,
sin’ auld lang syne.
I heard some old boys in rural Hampshire and couldn’t understand a word but I think that accent has mostly died out now.
I had a mate from Newcastle who spoke fluent German,unfortunately with a Geordie accent so that he was incomprehensible in TWO languages.
Melvyn Bragg’s a Cumbrian, not a Geordie, and he’s none too reliable on things on this side of the country. There’s actually very little Norse influence in Northumbria. Cumbria had Norse invaders, I believe, and Yorkshire had Danes, but neither settled east of the Pennines or north of the Tyne (and very few north of the Tees). The last major settlement in this area was by the Angles, and there’s still a strong Anglo-Saxon influence on the region’s dialect. Once small streams become burns instead of becks, you’ve come to the end of Viking settlements.
My apologies. I suspect, therefore, he was talking about Cumbrian dialect.
He may have been, though I’ve seen him myself explaining that you could identify the influence of the Vikings within the Danelaw by the many place names that end in “thorpe” or “thwaite” – while blithely indicating Northumberland, where they’re absent, and village after village ends in Anglo-Saxon “ington” and “ingham”.
Mind, “am gannin hwam” does sound Geordie, though I’d have said “hyem”, myself.
I’d say any older person speaking “ulster-scots” or inner city Glaswegian. Most other accents are easy peasy compared to those. For example try reading this. They argue that it’s a separate language but as someone cleverer than me once said, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
When I was a kid, my friends had trouble understanding my father’s Irish brogue, though I never did. He was from county Limerick, which seems to my ear a little more gutteral than some of the other Irish voices I’ve heard. Or maybe it was just him and his brothers, I dunno.
Why? “Unintelligible” is certainly something a dialect can win at, at least as much as “intelligible” is something it can lose at. If you tell me not to end my sentences with prepositions, I’ll slap you for trying to write Latin in English.
German dialects, BTW, are an interesting bunch–I hear that German Low Saxon and Dutch Low Saxon (that is, geographically close dialects of the German and Dutch languages) are more mutually intelligible than German Low Saxon and High German (that is, two geographically distant dialects of the German language).
That’s a truism, not a prescription. When Max Weinreich (or whoever) said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, he didn’t mean that’s what should separate a language from a dialect, he meant that’s what often does separate a language from a dialect. There are two examples of this that I often find illuminating:
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The Swedish and Norwegian languages are completely mutually intelligible–you can put a Swede who’s never heard a word of Norwegian in his life and a Norwegian who’s never heard a word of Swedish in his life next to each other at a party and they can strike up a conversation as if they grew up in the same city. They could just as easily be considered dialect groups of one larger language called Germanic Scandinavian or something, but they’re not, because Sweden and Norway each have an army and a navy. Weinreich would argue that that’s not sensible, and I would agree.
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Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible. The rate of intelligibility varies from speaker to speaker, but in general, an exclusive Mandarin speaker and an exclusive Cantonese speaker won’t understand each other fluently at a party. AIUI, it’s at least as difficult for them to strike up a conversation as it is between, say, a Spaniard and a Frenchman. Mandarin and Cantonese might as well be considered two separate languages, but they’re generally considered two dialects of the same language, simply called Chinese–because China has an army and a navy, while Mandarin and Cantonese speakers don’t have their own. Weinreich would argue that that’s not sensible, and I would agree.
So the classification of languages and dialects is something that can make a linguist’s head hurt, and IME it’s hard as hell to get a straight answer out of them. What it boils down to is this: If Scots is almost as difficult for an Englishman to understand as, say, Frisian, there’s no point in denying it language status. It’s also important to note that when Scots was officially considered “bad English” rather than its own dialect, that ruling was used to oppress the Scottish. The distinction is one of some historical importance.
Another example of what you’re talking about would be Serbo-Croatian.
I didn’t really make my point clear in my post about army/navy. I meant that if Ulster-Scots or Scots were the official languages of Ulster and Scotland and those places were independent perhaps I would view their dialects as separate languages. Many speakers of Ulster-Scots wouldn’t consider what they’re speaking to be anything but English just like I think my Dublin English is bleedin’ porfekt.
In Northern Ireland, Ulster-Scots is part of the broader political divide with (roughly speaking) Catholic/Republican/Gaelic on one side and Protestant/Unionist/Ulster-Scots on the other. Since the Unionists don’t really have a different language of their own they lay claim to Ulster-Scots as a separate, distinct language from English and Gaelic (Irish). That website I linked to in my earlier post is incomprehensible to begin with but if you put on a stereotypical Scots accent and say the words phonetically it becomes clearer.
My father was from West Ulster, a Catholic but his dialect and that of his siblings is as impenetrable to the untrained ear as Ulster-Scots would be.
I remember being on a bus somewhere in the vicinity of Chester, England. The bus stopped at a pub so that people could go to the bathroom. While waiting, I heard what has to be the most incomprensible English I’ve ever run across in my life. It seemed to be mostly consonants coming to abrupt stops in the back of the throat, with vowels entirely optional, and for all I could tell, random. Knowing England, I was probably in some little pocket where, five miles away, people spoke perfectly clearly.
On a daily basis, I deal with a lot of Indians. Their accents are highly variable, but there are some who enunciate consonants so softly, and roll their r’s to such an extent, that I just can’t understand what they’re saying. I get embarrassed having to ask them to repeat themselves, but they’re pretty good-natured about it.