European languages guide

Something intriguing I found on Twitter. There is also an earlier, simpler version floating around but it has a few errors I could spot. This one is better.

It basically tells you based on the writing which language you might be looking at.

I am tempted to implement it in software just for fun.

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Accurate except for the Italian/Sardu split. Not sure what that’s supposed to mean.

Not sure, I don’t know either language particularly well.
I did a short test on the languages I know at least a bit of, and it was OK there. I guess a native speaker of some of them will notice more potential errors.

(I am actually not 100% sure if the “øy” criteria between Danish and Norwegian is accurate. My Norwegian is just enough to halfway communicate and my Danish is even worse. Seriously. Danish is damn hard. Even if you have learned the languages of two neighboring countries.)

Getting bunched together with the Germans, how typical. :roll_eyes: :wink:

I wondered about that.
Is there any letter or letter combination that separates Austrian German from German German? I don’t know any from the top of my head.

The earlier list failed even for Swiss German but that was corrected.

It’s all extremely regional and contextual. Impossible to pin it on just one syllable.

In Lautschrift this would maybe be easier.

Yeah, that’s out of scope for this.
The diagram is just made to recognize written language (if it is long enough, it obviously won’t work for short texts).

Otherwise you would have problems in German already, with 40+ dialects. Hell, boarisch for example even has it’s own wikipedia! :smiley:

I think it’s good. While we do have both letters in the Danish alphabet, I don’t think we have any words containing øy. Made a quick search, but it came up blank.

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6 languages under the Dagestan flag alone. Wow, I did not know there‘s so many kyrillic languages.

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So while we were living in Germany (Swabia) we went to Bavaria for the weekend. Now I had studied German from the 7th to the 12th grade. Fluent? No. Not by a long shot. But I can normally read a menu.

We are in a nice restaurant and I’m looking at the menu. I can read the left page. I cannot read the right page. I thought I was going crazy. The right page was the same as the left page but written in Bavarian(?). :grimacing:

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My wife is German and comes from Hanover. We had a trip to Munich last year and she really struggled reading the menus in restaurants etc. She said at times she felt like a foreigner in her own country :slight_smile:
I found after a couple of beers I was fluent though, funny that :beers:

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I too tend to become fluent after a few beers…it usually in German but on occasion, ancient Akkadian and Sumerian…which is kind of weird. :grimacing:

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This (young) lady train operator speaks in an Austrian dialect; actually, skip this dialect, as her body-language says enough…

OBB: red haired ladies on red locs… :wink:

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Actually she’s from the far west, which is a different language area than the rest of Austria. It’s more akin to Swiss.

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