Manc and Scouse pronunciation is actually quite different.
Liverpool and Manchester barely existed prior to the industrial revolution. And even the present-day Liverpudlian accent is heavily influenced by Irish immigration.
There’s genuine dialects to be found (try Yorkshire, Norfolk, Cumbria, Cornwall). They have survived in the country because that’s where the people who didn’t relocated in the industrial revolution actually remained.
Did you miss “My Fair Lady” or “Pygmalion?”
There are quite a few areas in the Eastern US where distinct dialects are still fairly well preserved in the Appalachian Mountains.
Yes, but closer to each other than a London accent, which is what I meant.
To be fair, s/he did admit it was because of using a too-narrow definition of ‘dialect’. When Cantonese is called a ‘dialect’ of Chinese, vs. Mandarin, another ‘dialect’, whereas as far as I can see they’re almost different languages, you can see why people would get confused.
I want to confirm your impression: the “unintelligable” thing in German dialects is grossly overstated. Sure, there are lots of differences, but I (being from Vienna) understand practically everyone from Austria and Germany just fine, and they understand me, even when everyone speaks in his dialect without trying to resort to “standard” German.
A litte nitpick: Plattdeutsch is not “anything else” from standard German. It´s a specific dialect spoken by some (mostly elderly) people in northern Germany, and is somewhat similiar to Dutch.
This and the more brutal variants of Schwytzerdütsch (which can really be considered as a separate language) are probably the only dialects that are really unintelligable to a large number of German speakers.
That doesn’t make sense. Norwegian and Swedish are considered different languages.
On the other hand, I spent an hour listening to a tape of an old Suffolk guy before I had any idea what he was talking about. And I grew up here.
That’s more political than linguistic. They’re different languages (rather than dialects of “Scandinavian”) because they’re spoken in different countries. Same with Danish.
Oops. meant to add: Mandarin and Cantonese are considered dialects because they are spoken in the same country. If China was divided, they’d probably be considered different languages.
On a personal note: my idiolect is somewhere between English English and Australian English. I once met a person in Australia who said (after hearing me speak a few words), that he wasn’t sure whether I was from Leeds or Leicester. Not bad, considering that I lived most of my first 10 years in Leeds, and my mother came from Leicester. And even better, considering that he not only had to pick my blend, but distinguish it from neighbouring dialects, which are very similar in West Yorkshire and in the Midlands. (Though, of couse, West Yorkshire English and Midlands English are quite different). That gives you an idea of how localised and distinct the dialects are in England.
Exactly the point I hoped you’d notice. Scots struggles to be recognised as a language, for political reasons. Such as being spoken in different countries.
As linguist Max Weinreich once said: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”.
Germany does indeed have a slew of dialects, but they aren’t all Plattdeutsch; Plattdeutsch is a specific dialect of northern Germany, especially around Hamburg. This page has an interesting side-by-side comparison of English, German and Plattdeutsch. My parents, who are both native German speakers, have said they find it very difficult to understand a couple of their friends whenever those friends slip into Plattdeutsch, so I would say in this case that “practically unintelligible” may be not too far off the mark.
I grew up listening to my parents speak German, but they both speak rather different dialects. My mom is from Bavaria, and is fond of pointing out that when she was a girl (circa WWII), it was possible to pin the town that someone came from based upon their choice of vocabulary and pronunciation of certain words. (We’re talking about only a few kms distance, here.) My dad is Donauschwaben, ethnic German from a region called the Banat which is now divided among Hungary, Serbia and Romania. (He was born in the part now in Serbia.) A very simple illustration of the differences between their dialects and Hochdeutsch (standard German):
English: I have
Hochdeutsch: Ich habe (‘habe’ pronounced as a 2-syllable word)
Mom’s dialect: I’ hab (with the ‘ch’ for ‘Ich’ swallowed so as to be hardly noticeable, and the ‘b’ in ‘hab’ pronounced like ‘p’)
Dad’s dialect: I’ han (‘ch’ for ‘Ich’ rarely pronounced at all, and the verb form obviously different)
As an adult, I took formal German classes for a while but drove my teacher crazy asking about all the deviations of my parents’ dialects from Hochdeutsch. He finally asked me not to ask any more questions in class, lest I confuse the other students and encourage bad linguistic habits. He also said that my dad’s dialect was about as close to Hochdeutsch as backwoods West Virginian was to the Queen’s English. :eek: My dad did grow up in a rural area, but it was less than thrilling to be told that one of your parents spoke like a hick.
On preview, I see z_z_z’s comments about the overexaggeration of unintelligibility: I’ve talked to my parents about this in the past, and they seemed to feel that TV has dampened some of the differences across the board since WWII. I’ll also add that some of the impression no doubt comes from non-native German speakers who get frustrated when the natives slip heavy into the local dialect just for grins. Something like what happened when this American sat down at a bar with a bunch of Aussies, no doubt. 
It was only when I moved away from Cumbria that I realised “scrow” wasn’t a standard English word (I knew phrases like “I’ll bray thee!” and “I’se gan’ yam” were local, and “grand as owt” tends to be taken as meaning “the old gentleman is not at home” in the rest of the country)
A Bible reading in Cumbrian
Another (Noah’s Ark)
There was also a whole different number system back in the day, at least for counting sheep:-
One to ten:-
Yan, tan, tethera, methera, pimp, sethera, lethera, hovera, dovera, dick.
(Fifteen was “bumfit” for added humour)
OTOH, when a Scottish girl said “I’ll give you a wee chap on the door” I feared some poor midget would suffer.
Oh, hell yeah: when I was a 2nd year (in Yorkshire), one of our teachers spoke Broad Yorkshire to us one day. :eek: I think that one of my classmates understood her, because he had a grandfather who spoke Broad Yorkshire from time to time (or something), but to the rest of us she sounded like an alien.
Another anecdote: while my family was living in England we took a vacation to Tenerife, and when we were there someone who overheard me talking with my family could tell that we were from Yorkshire! I knew I’d picked up a bit of an accent, but it wasn’t nearly as strong when I was just around family as it was when I was with my British friends, and I was amazed that someone could tell I was from Yorkshire when I thought I was talking “American.” 
Just as a general plea, please get their dialects tape recorded. I work on the periphery of such things, and I know how the next generation will curse you for not bothering!!!..
So several posters have weighed in on the question of mutual intelligibility of German dialects, but no one has addressed the Italian dialects. Italian’s being ignored again. Minghia, am I the only Doper out of all the thousands of Dopers who can speak up for Italian?
The OP was correct in citing Italian dialects as being mutually incomprehensible. Especially between the far north of Italy and the far south (“Mezzogiorno”). What makes it even more complicated is the Friuliuan dialect in the far northeast, which is so far away from Italian as to be practically a separate language, possibly more closely related to the Rumantsch of Graubunden in Switzerland than to Italian per se. Venetian dialect seems to me to have been influenced by Friulian. All I know is that when I went to Venice it was almost impossible for me to understand their Italian.
The speech of Val d’Aosta in the far northwest of Italy is more French than Italian.
There are three dialects in Sardinia; one of these is like an Italian dialect, not so remote from the variant of the Ligurian dialect spoken in Corsica. But the other two are Sardinian, which is really a non-Italian language all to itself. Sardinian has preserved some very archaic features from the ancestral Latin that do not survive in any other Romance language.
The speech of Sicily is similar to Calabrian dialect, because Sicily had been depopulated in the 13th century after the French occupiers kicked out the Muslims. The landlords needed peasants to work their feudal estates (latifundia), so they imported peasants from Calabria. Prior to that, Sicily had been a Greek-speaking land. Sicilians spoke Greek even during the Roman Empire. Before the Arabs took over Sicily in the 9th century, it had been part of the Byzantine Empire. The use of an Italian dialect in Sicily is relatively recent as things go, dating back only 800 years. A uneducated Sicilian villager and an uneducated Piedmontese villager will not be able to talk to each other at all, not unless they’ve learned some standard Italian in school or from the radio or TV. Standard Italian was based on the Tuscan dialect, artificially blended with some Roman dialect, some Genovese, and what have you. With modern education and broadcasting, the younger people from different regions of Italy now are able to talk to one another, which they often couldn’t before.
Dialectologists know that the area where a language originated has the greatest differentiation of dialects in a small space; by contrast, an area into which a language expanded recently has a smaller number of dialects in a larger space. For example, all the many local dialects of English found across Britain. Has anyone counted them all? The United States, for all its vast area, has only three dialects: Northeast, Midland, and Southern. There are four if you count Brooklynese (seriously). Southern dialect is subdivided into Coastal Southern and Highland Southern.
Apparently you are. Stand up and be the lone beacon shining in the darkness! 
I have been meaning for some time to get on the stick and put together my family tree, as far as we know it, together with photos, scanned documents, etc. A voice recording of my parents would be a nice addition to that. I could never say I was recording for posterity, though, because then they’d probably get way too self-conscious and slip into Hochdeutsch (which they both learned in school, but have to make an effort to speak).
Thanks for the Cumbrian reading link! It reminds me very much of what I assumed was all just psychedelic nonsense-talk on The Small Faces’ Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake album; anyone know if this was simply a Cumbrian actor and/or an in-joke?
I think we’re confusing accents and dialects here. I understand that ‘dialect’ is a more serious divergence of word use than an accent, probably involving different sets of vocabulary for common words (i.e. beyond slang), grammar and pronounciation that can seriously affect the ability of someone else to understand you. What we seem to be left with in the US are differences largely in accent (i.e. “you sound funny”). One exception might be what I learned in a linguistics class as Black English Vernacular, which has its own consistent grammar (although largely the same vocabulary) seperate from Standard American English. Even then a BEV speaker can express meaning to a SAE speaker usually without much difficulty beyond some finer points of tense.
It’s not as if Californians and Ohio residents need translators. We clearly have nothing going on as far as language divergence like it sounds has happened in Italy or Germany.
As far as these accents: You can hear if someone is from Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston or New York. So much for one “Northeast” accent, let alone dialect. Mel Blanc’s Bugs Bunny voice was supposed to be a cross between the Bronx and Brooklyn, two boroughs of the same city.
This map appears to be claiming 8 regional ‘dialects,’ although it seems accent would be more appropiate. I doubt that people in Michigan ad Nebraska have developed different grammar structure and vocabularies, beyond a handful of archaic sland terms. Assuming this is an accent map, 8 zones is a gross oversimplification. South Jersey, Pittsburgh and Nebraska don’t sound much alike. I don’t understand what a “Midland” accent (let alone dialect) is supposed to mean.
I submit that SAE is pretty much one dialect with a variety of accents, and that BEV is a seperate dialect, but certainly close enough to SAE to be intelligible.
No, but there’s no need to swear.
Absolutely; in fact there is a strong tendence to consider them separate languages, especially locally.
And not only from Calabria, there’s an interesting story. The kings of Sicily tried to attract immigrants from all parts of Italy with tax benefits and other advantages, and there was quite an influx from the north. To people of southern extraction it is quite ironic to hear of Lombards migrating to Sicily, but historical conditions change, don’t they?
This is reflected in the nuances and particularities of the local cities. My father told me that the dialect of his particular town sounded eerlily northern to other Sicilians. This was confirmed by another lady I knew that told me how she thought that people from the same town sounded a funny mix of Sicilian and Milanese. Ok, she was possibly exaggerating.