Mutual Intelligibility

Let's keep this short and sweet, shall we?

To what extent are these dialects similar?

i) European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese

ii) European French, Québécois French and French spoken in Africa

iii) Swiss German, Austrian German and German German

I actually am quite curious :u:

OP

I understand French to quite a good level and I can understand both Canadian French and European French. My mum is a native French speaker and she can understand both fine too. I don't think it's too different, really. They use some different expressions and have a different accent but it's nothing drastic.

French spoken in Africa depends on where I think. It's a whole continent so there are going to be lots of different forms of French in different parts. My friend is Algerian and she speaks French like a European, but maybe that's different. My family is also from Mauritius which is an island of the south east coast of Africa, so maybe not what you're thinking of but they speak French, which is just like European French with a Mauritian accent and Creole/Patois which is a "broken" form of French. I find this a bit hard to understand but a lot of the words are the same and they are all derived from French so I imagine that a native European French speaker would be able to understand a bit after they get used to it, though it might be challenging.

Reply 3

xmarilynx

18

Canadian French sounds completely different to European French - I've had some French French speakers say that they don't even recognise it as French at first! But despite the accent and a few different words it is easily understandable.

Be aware that the dialects do vary significantly even within Germany... Austrian German is fairly similar to Bavarian (the dialect spoken in Southern Germany), but even Hochdeutsch speakers understand it, in fact lots of them go to uni in Austria because it's cheaper. Swiss German is almost un-understandable, apparently Swiss German speakers have to use Hochdeutsch to communicate with German speakers from Germany.

Reply 4

Xurvi

11

For French, as Marilyn said, the Canadian accent is so different at times when I hear it I don't realise it's French. Loads of words are different or have other meanings (bec for them can mean a kiss :s-smilie:

), and their habit of removing every English word is confusing. Swiss French is much closer though some strong accent can make it hard to understand; there are also many other phrases and expressions not found in Metropolitan French. I read some text once that embodied that: couldn't make sense of any of it.
African French, no idea, I suppose pretty much the same.

About Portuguese, Europeans usually can understand Brazilian perfectly fine (notably because a lot of Brazilian TV series are imported to Portugal), but the opposite is rarely true. Brazilian sounds more like Spanish than Portuguese does, and is a bit simplified (spelling notably, a little grammar here and there) but nothing drastic. Portuguese doesn't sound as clear as Brazilian, vowels are barely pronounced, there is a lot of shshsh sounds, and they speak super fast. The best would be to go on youtube and listen to them speaking.
Haven't listened to Mozambique/Capo Verdo/Guine e Bisao/etc accents so I can't comment on these.

Edit - omitted "Canadian".

(edited 13 years ago)

Reply 5

Anatheme

18

Original post by Xurvi

For French, as Marilyn said, the Canadian accent is so different at times when I hear it I don't realise it's French. Loads of words are different or have other meanings (bec for them can mean a kiss :s-smilie:

), and their habit of removing every English word is confusing. Swiss French is much closer though some strong accent can make it hard to understand; there are also many other phrases and expressions not found in Metropolitan French. I read some text once that embodied that: couldn't make sense of any of it.
African French, no idea, I suppose pretty much the same.

About Portuguese, Europeans usually can understand Brazilian perfectly fine (notably because a lot of Brazilian TV series are imported to Portugal), but the opposite is rarely true. Brazilian sounds more like Spanish than Portuguese does, and is a bit simplified (spelling notably, a little grammar here and there) but nothing drastic. Portuguese doesn't sound as clear as Brazilian, vowels are barely pronounced, there is a lot of shshsh sounds, and they speak super fast. The best would be to go on youtube and listen to them speaking.
Haven't listened to Mozambique/Capo Verdo/Guine e Bisao/etc accents so I can't comment on these.

Edit - omitted "Canadian".

We have "bécot" for kiss, so "bec" isn't too different, tbf. I do, however, agree that their tendency to make everything English supposedly French-souding, even though it's a good idea, is reaaally annoying. I mean a Happy Meal becoming a "Joyeux Festin" is really ridiculous, especially when they use such archaic French, like "joute" for a fight. I used to have a French Canadian flatmate, and with my flatmate from Paris we'd often have to get her to repeat or translate stuff. Sometimes it was so bad we had to use English. She didn't have that strong an accent, but the slang was just from another planet.

But yeah, sometimes the accent is so strong and the slang to different that they need to subtitle films in what they call "Parisian French" (between you and me, I don't see the difference between French and Parisian French, but whatever). Belgian French is slightly different too. It's understandable, but you'll still have the odd word here and there that doesn't sound quite normal, more like American and British English, though. I haven't really been to African countries, but in general, they tend to speak like books, only with their own accent, or a pidgin like Créole in La Réunion, which is a kind of simplified French, really quite funny to decipher.

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