Dialects That Sound Like Completely Different Languages

A language is a dialect with an army and navy." Officially, everything in this video is 'just a dialect' — of German, Chinese, Arabic, Italian, Japanese, French or Polish. In practice, speakers of the standard language often can't understand them at all: Swiss German gets subtitles on German TV, Cantonese and Mandarin are barely mutually intelligible, and Japanese hosts needed a Tsugaru mother's story explained line by line. Here are 23 'dialects' that sound like completely different languages — each with a real native-speaker clip and the story behind it. You'll hear a pupil telling a story in Taiwanese Hokkien (a language once banned in Taiwan's schools), Okinawan (punished with 'dialect cards'), a Walser German village hidden in the Italian Alps, Taishanese — the old language of America's Chinatowns — a Shetland poet explaining Norse-flavoured words, and finally Mária, a Danube Swabian grandmother in Hungary, recorded by her grandson. Which 'dialect' do you think deserves to be called a language? Tell us in the comments 👇