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ITT we will post examples of dialects, that do 'officially' (whatever that means) belong to your language (say, a dialect of English), but which you find absolutely unintelligible.

For eample, even though this is called 'Dutch', I would have absolutely no idea what these people were saying if there were no subtitles: Subtitling dialects is quite common on TV, mostly in holland but also in this Belgian example.

http://youtu.be/vxlt8GoF6IU

Only in the little interview sections they are - kind of - talking standard Belgian Dutch, the rest is in some dialect, I don't even know what dialect. They are arguing where a door must be placed; standard dutch door is 'deur' [døːr] but in this dialect it sounds like [dɒːj] or something. St. dutch here 'hier' [hiːr] becomes [eɪː], stuff like that.

There are people who are against subtitling dialects because they find it discriminating for some reason. Such as the guy complaining about it in this video (in unintelligible West-Flemish dialect), which was I think not entirely serious but not entirely non-serious either. Honestly, I am fine with dialects on TV (I love them) but nobody is going to understand you, so don't bitch if you are subtitled...

http://youtu.be/QE57zsos1AM

Your last fragment is from a satirical show, and is entirely not serious.

I'm not really aware of any particular accents I find difficult to understand. I think inside the British Isles I could understand most if not all accents, and it would have to be an accent existing in some out-the-way corner.
I heard an example of Cajun mixed with French and didn't understand much (I was barely aware of when they changed language).

My girlfriend (Swiss) doesn't understand Canadian French very well.

Funny how different languages have different divergence of dialects. Or, perhaps more linguistically accurate; that there are more minority languages in some countries (such as belgium and the netherlands) than others, which are related to the standard language, but still unintelligible, yet classified as dialects.

I am unable to understand some british isle dialects, but that's mostly because I am not a native speaker of english.

Many Northern Swedish varieties are much impossible for the general population to understand. In some cases phrases and words are only understandable because they resemble something in English or Norwegian with a similar meaning for example and not Swedish, and if you didn't speak/understood those languages you would be at a loss.


edit: Example:
Piitish
Oba häjna.
English:
On this one

Easier one
Piitish::
I hav e hus
English
I have a house.

Yemenite Hebrew.

Normal understandable standard Israeli: /vaʔa'ni be'toχ go'la paʔa'maj ʦole'lim/
Incomprehensible crazy bizarre Yemenite: /wæʔæ'ni: bæ'θø:x 'ʤø:lɔ: pɔ'ʕɔ:mæj sˁø:læ'li:m/

Also Ashkenazi: /'vjanɪ bɪ'sɔjx 'gɔjlɔ 'pjɔmaj ʦɔjlɪ'lɪm/

I can't understand most of spoken Faroese but Faroese people seem to have a pretty easy time with Icelandic.

Rural/bedouin dialects of Arabic from all areas. Plus North African dialects, particularly Moroccan (which is famously unintelligible even to native speakers).

As far as English is concerned - there are some old person dialects I find difficult to understand. Also strong Scots and inner-city English obviously have plenty of terms I might not know (but this doesn't make them incomprehensible).

For example, from http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~naeser/varietaet.htm and http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~naeser/waldeck.htm:

1. Nordfriesisch: Boldixum/Föhr (1936) 1' 30"
51. Höchstalemannisch 2: Macugnaga / östl. Monte Rosa (WN 1973; von CR-Kopie zurückgewonnen) 1' 00"

These are dialects of German from the very north and south of the German-speaking area, respectively. It's unintelligible to me and will be for most Germans. Where I'm from, old people speak kinda like this if they still know the dialect, and although I don't speak the local Platt, I still find it quite intelligible:

8. Westfälisch 2: Landau Krs. Waldeck (WN 1985) 1' 51"
25. Nordhessen 2: Waldeck: Giflitz b. Bad Wildungen // Mengeringhausen u. Berndorf (beide WN 1985) 1' 45"
Schmillinghausen (1985)

Other than that, I suppose most Germans from the northern half will find Upper Bavarian and Swiss German of any variety unintelligible.

I can understand pretty much any English, barring some of the extremely deviant second-language forms from Africa or Asia, but I don't always, if the speech is fluent and I've not practiced hearing it. Glaswegian of course, but I've also been temporarily stumped by strong Geordie, Teesside, LME, and West Country. Sometimes I've even had trouble with some bits of very strong 'chav'-style Estuary.
Also it took me several episodes before I could understand Snoop from The Wire without subtitles, though I don't know how much of that is accent and how much is diction.

In French, I agree with Cajun being a tad difficult to understand without subtitles, though it's not incomprehensible to me in comparison to Louisiana Creole. I also tend to have a little more difficulty with dialects from France, seeing as I'm from Canada.

In Japanese, there would be quite a few incomprehensible dialects, but to give two examples from the south:

Tanegashima
Kagoshima

Salmoneus wrote:I can understand pretty much any English, barring some of the extremely deviant second-language forms from Africa or Asia, but I don't always, if the speech is fluent and I've not practiced hearing it. Glaswegian of course, but I've also been temporarily stumped by strong Geordie, Teesside, LME, and West Country. Sometimes I've even had trouble with some bits of very strong 'chav'-style Estuary.

r u avin a giggle m8? ill bash ur fookin head in oi swear on me mum.

As an American who's lived in several parts of the country, I can understand (I think) all white American dialects. Very, very heavy AAVE can be opaque. Most British dialects are accessible, too, although it took a couple episodes of Taggart to adjust to the heavy Glaswegian.

Most English accents are accessible to me including most Scottish accents if the diction and speaker is clear; however Northern Irish and Scottish accents can get me, most recently a young guy from Tyrone who happened to speak rather fast, I had to ask him to repeat things quite a lot.

Yng wrote:Rural/bedouin dialects of Arabic from all areas. Plus North African dialects, particularly Moroccan (which is famously unintelligible even to native speakers).

Yep. I can't count the times the Jordanian owner of a local hookah lounge has reminded me to switch dialects when I unconsciously begin speaking with him in Moroccan Arabic.

The AAVE where I grew up is remarkably closer to GenAm than it is in most other places; when I go to Baltimore, it takes me a few minutes to realize the people on the metro are even speaking English. (Then again, sometimes they aren't.) I also can't understand anything from parts of Britain that aren't England.

I've heard that the more conservative dialects around here are impenetrable to anyone who's not used to them, but obviously I have no trouble with them. I don't think my own accent would be that hard to understand, but it's gotten a lot closer to standard than it used to be. (My parents have told me that I used to have a straight-up Southern drawl even. I must have lost that around middle school.)

Also: there's a place in Northern Ireland called Tyrone? wat

The most remarkable North American English accent I've come across is the North Carolina Outer Banks accent:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXs9cf2YWwg

I have had no problem with any Spanish speaker from anywhere in years. The one that most recently gave me some... curiosity, was a speaker from rural Chile near Concepción (the city that was utterly destroyed during the earthquake). He often did not lenite his intervocalic /b d g/, and besides that he also inserted vowels there and there (e.g. [paˈlato] for plato, and when he pronounced word-initial [pl] he did it with obvious self-consciousness and difficulty). There was still no real problem though.

When I was a child, my parents loved watching movies produced in Spain. Which I dreaded to watch because it'd often happen that I wouldn't understand the older men in them, due to their heavy vowel glottalization (it seems glottalizating about every vowel was popular among men in Franco-era Spain or something...). Though a few months ago I stumbled upon a video that included some comments from an old man from the Asturian Academy (speaking in Spanish of course) who had this heavy glottalization I'm talking about, and I had no real problems understand him. Besides, if my parents liked watching such movies they obviously understood these men's dialogue.

The dialect of Rauma is typically thought to be the least intelligible one in Finnish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agkIOGfmbyM

It's a south western dialect and has a pretty distinct accent not that different from what they have in Turku. Even still, the difficulty in understanding comes purely from the generous use of not that widely used loans. When they restrict themselves from the most narrowly spread vocabulary, as in the above example, their speech is actually not difficult to understand at all.

Maybe surprisingly the hardest forms of Finnish for me to totally understand are examples of the old Helsinki slang. That's simply because it's full of words that practically no one uses any more. For the same reason it's hard to find authentic examples of it. This is a fair one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KcHLd4hpQ4

It's a performance but the accent is actually a spontaneous one and the singing doesn't distort the language much at all. That's largely OK for me but has a steady stream of words not in my active vocabulary.

I found it really hard to understand Puerto Rican Spanish when I went there and Argentinian is a bit hard too. Mexican and most Iberian varieties of Spanish are pretty easy.

North-American varieties of French are probably the most difficult to me.

"Unintelligible" is probably too strong a word for Quebec French; although I should mention that Quebecois movies are often released with subtitles in French, and I do need the subtitles sometimes.
(Also, most of the Quebec French I've heard isn't really colloquial speech, which is probably a lot worse.)

Chiac (New Brunswick Acadian French), on the other hand, is completely unintelligible.

Ars Lande wrote:North-American varieties of French are probably the most difficult to me.

Have you ever heard any Cajun French?

Back when I was in high school, we had a listening comprehension test, which included texts in Cajun French(*); I couldn't understand a word.
I'll try and find some proper samples tonight and see what I can do now.

(*I think the purpose of the test was to provide statistics to the Ministry of Education. I have no idea why they wanted to test our comprehension of Cajun French.

Nortaneous wrote:Also: there's a place in Northern Ireland called Tyrone? wat

Yeah, in Gaelic it's Tír Eoghain, it means "Land of Eoghan". Contae Thír Eoghain is one of the larger counties on the island.

Ars Lande wrote:Back when I was in high school, we had a listening comprehension test, which included texts in Cajun French(*); I couldn't understand a word.
I'll try and find some proper samples tonight and see what I can do now.

(*I think the purpose of the test was to provide statistics to the Ministry of Education. I have no idea why they wanted to test our comprehension of Cajun French.

Here is a fairly good sample, replete with subtitles. I've heard far less comprehensible samples of Creole, though, bordering on marbles-in-mouth consonantlessness.