What is the hardest English dialect for you to understand?

Glaswegian is rough on my Canadian ears.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXGP4Sez\_Us](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXGP4Sez_Us) in one ear out the other

I (American) worked with a man who had just come from Cameroon. I couldn't understand half of what he said until he'd been here a while and started speaking more standard English.

I’m a native English speaker (U.S.) but Cajun English makes me really work to understand it sometimes.

I’m an Aussie here and some of how more “bogan” dialects don’t even sound real to me

A lot of British accents are hard for me to understand as a Canadian. Specifically Scottish accents.

The Scottish accent is one of the most difficult for me, personally.

I think the question is kind of hard to answer because of inherent issues in defining a language since things like Scots and Nigerian Pidgin are technically mutually intelligible with English, But, excluding creoles and Scots, I would probably say some varieties of Irish English, especially in south central Ireland (Tipperary-Cashel area). And some more derived AAVE varieties are really hard to understand.

Scottish. Some of them (the further North they hail from).. it’s supposedly English but I maybe understand every third word.

Native English speaker (American) here. In general I find Scottish English the hardest to understand, I had to work at intentionally acclimating myself to it. However some of the hardest individuals for me to understand at first have been some of my colleagues from near Pune, India. However that has only been a few of them, so I wonder if they were originally from a different region.

Newfoundland English. I've become used to it, but there's certainly a learning curve. https://youtu.be/L1QMVPgsjaA?si=T2njvPgjnqjz-3qe https://youtu.be/banAMiFK3ak?si=EY10n6gzS4e0IZtj

Nigerian/many African accents. I have a Nigerian friend and I do the best I can to converse, but his accent is very tough for me to understand.

I worked for a global company and have a pretty good ear. However my friend and I went to Scotland for vacation. Edinburgh-no problem with the accent. We went to Glasgow -OMG. We were in a museum watching some art movie. A security guard came in and made small talk for 2-3 minutes. I literally understood about 10% of what he was saying. My friend was at about the same level.

I love how you specifically asked for non natives but 15 natives responded instead

When I worked in a call centre, we had calls from both the UK and Ireland; I always struggled more with Newcastle and Sligo accents

Scottish

1. Caribbean creoles. 2. Subregional dialects from the UK - there’s some that are absolutely unintelligible when people are speaking at a native speed.

Indian and british☠

I'm a native speaker (Australian) and I find Scottish the hardest to understand, funny when I have Scottish heritage. My neighbour is Scottish and I feel so bad always asking him to repeat himself

Geordie or Glaswegian

English learners don't know most of the English accents. So it's hard to make a judgement. With my limited knowledge of English, I think Irish is maybe up there among the hardest. [Irish sheep farmer video.](https://youtu.be/pit0OkNp7s8)

I teach Japanese adults and they often tell me American speech is harder for them to follow than Australian and British accents.

I’m from near Appalachia in the US, and for me it’s actually the accent that about half my family speaks with. There’s a middle American US farm accent that swallows a lot of vowels and stretches out other vowels. There’s an old joke here that works best written, and gives you an idea what I mean. Two farmers talking: M R DUCKS M R NOT OSMR, C M WANGS? LIB, M R DUCKS!

Midwestern American, I would agree on cajon accent being very difficult. [This](https://youtube.com/shorts/XXucyygKXg0?si=tsbMFIi4UE3naoWg) video is one I can understand but wouldn’t be shocked if ppl couldn’t

Check this one out: [https://youtube.com/shorts/G2TNCdj6iIQ?si=\_nrmqaX7Z\_qepbTP](https://youtube.com/shorts/G2TNCdj6iIQ?si=_nrmqaX7Z_qepbTP)

Has to be Glaswegian.

Most British and Irish people, probably even some from Northern Ireland, would struggle with 'the man from strabane'. [George Cunningham The Strabane Man full Interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhGbpatmplQ)

polish is on another level

Probably a very heavy Scottish, Irish or Cajun dialect, almost doesn't sound like english

The fast-talking poor Brits from the movies.

I once asked a man from Liverpool (scouse accent) what language he’d just been speaking. Turns out it was English.

I'm from the north east US and when I was in the UK several people warned me and my friend that we would t be able to understand people from New Castle in northern England because of their strong accents. I didn't actually find it to be that difficult to understand, but people in that area seemed to have a hard time with my American/Boston accent and often asked me to repeat things.

I am a Dane. The most difficult accent for me is southern USA AAVE. I follow a few YouTubers who use it, and I need to have captions on. It is the way it has an almost French(?) accent. On the other hand, Northern English and Scottish accents are easy to follow. They sound like they have a Norwegian or Norse accent. Sometimes they even use the same words as Norse, different from English words.

Northern Irish is the toughest. I need subtitles for them

Barbados. End of discussion.

Every time someone mentions **Baltimore accents** I immediately think of this amazing video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj7a-p4psRA

Scottish and Cajun. Both need subtitles.

Good luck understanding Gullah if you've never heard it before.

Indian English dialects. The intonation is off. The pronunciation is off. The words used can be confusingly bizarre. It's a real slog to parse meaning. The only other dialects I find equally incomprehensible are like Appalachian hick dialects. Just gibberish. All others are fine really.

Jamaican

I'm a native speaker, and I don't have any difficulty with any major city dialect, it's mainly the ones from remote areas where especially the older generations have little contact with people outside their community. Those are almost an entire different language.

This is going to be limited to our exposure and I don’t have a widespread international exposure. For countries that the native language is other than English, I would not consider those dialects to be part of this discussion. Example: Are there places in India where English is their primary language? I’m unaware.

A lot of them. Between my hearing comprehension and the fact that I need practice to learn an accent it's a lot of them. The only ones I can do well with are languages I specifically learned some in. I'm going to kick the dialect and creole discussion because that's going beyond the scope of speaking English to some sort of standard. And because I speak a creole that's more or less merged into a dialect by this point.

I was driving from northern California to Reno, NV and was talking with someone at a rest stop 5 miles from the border. Utterly incomprehensible. I'm a native speaker from NJ and I had no clue what was said in the whole 5 min conversation

West Country, Geordie, and Weegie when they’re at their broadest

My electric company has a call center on Louisiana. I don't usually need to call them, but the two times I have? One person I could understand, the other I truly could not. 

We are Aussie and went to a place in northern England called Barnsley and we couldn’t understand each other.

Newfy, I’m from western Canada and it’s almost impossible for me to understand when it’s spoken at the rate they do

Hands down, it's Geordie. Real Geordie is totally incomprehensible to me.

Dundonian

Gotta be the Scottish accent