I had a roommate from Manchester (UK) for a couple months back in college. I'm American (US). He seemed to have no trouble understanding me, but I usually couldn't understand what he said without him repeating it multiple times.

I remember having to interpret for my boyfriend when we drove through the Western end of Virginia. The accents get thick out in Appalachia. We're both native speakers, he's even from Virginia, but by the coast.

Parisians will never stop complaining about québécois. They even show subtitles in France when they speak québécois on TV. None of the French Canadians I know seem to have any issue understanding traditional French though.

Edit: Spanish is another language where we can mostly understand each other despite very varied dialects

The overwhelming consensus here is that a strong brogue Scottish accent is the main exception.

Oh you've never had to deal with a Scottish person before I see.

Idk, I recently heard some thick Scottish English and I couldn't understand literally anything. That might be in part due to the fact that I'm not a native speaker, but still I believe people outside the British isles would struggle with it.

Some of the uniformity is a result of cultural domination of specific centres and now unavoidable loss of original dialectal variation.

Have you ever heard Scottish person speak?

Like, seriously nards-deep into full Scottish brogue? It’s like a language that bears zero resemblance to the English language.

Although TBH, have a pretty readheaded lass talk to me in Scottish, and fuck me she could read the phone book and I wouldn’t give a shit I’d just be sitting there catching flies trying to soak it all in.

Relevant example

Wow, lots of people picking out whole regions to say they cant understand and i... Have never had that problem. Honestly, really, english is easy to catch the ear and even people who barely speak it can usually get legible words out. You never make the sounds accidentally.
I'm not a big fan of mumbly accents, its just lazy about the sounds but if you've ever understood grumbling and mumbling you can get any accent.

(Note: not true for dialects that have their own local words for things)

Do we? I remember watching movies like Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels when I was younger and never having a clue what they were talking about.

Yeah, like yesterday I was talking to my American friends about football on the telly, and then after I ate my crisps and chips, I went and had myself some tea with tea and muffins

I've got virtual friends or acquaintances in different parts of Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Spain, etc. They all conjugate some verbal times 'weirdly' or say 'funny' things, but yeah, pretty normal communication. I actually adopted some words from their regions.

(No, I still won't celebrate a fucking day for the Spanish speaking world, friend from Spain that leans a little heavily into Hispanism...).

Are you talking about Arabic? I understand it changes a lot. It must be amazing to speak Arabic. The oceans of culture, of old philosophers, poets, etc.

Have you seen the hedge scene from Hot Fuzz?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cun-LZvOTdw

Yea I live in the Netherlands and there is a fishing village just a 15 minute bike ride away from me. If the people there speak in their own dialect I can't understand anything they say. If I drive to the north to the province Friesland, less than 100 km away, they have their own official language besides Dutch that only around 400k speak. That's less people than half of the inhabitants of Amsterdam yet Frisian is fully recognized and official and you can spend your daily life there without speaking a word Dutch even though you are still in the Netherlands. Some kids there don't even learn their first Dutch words until they go to school.

I think at least part of the reason why English has become an agreed upon international language is because these variations are permissible. If everyone had to speak RP, then the language wouldn’t be as accessible.

I think it's the harsh consonant sounds. I'm not a linguist and am sure there's some term for it, but it seems like we identify words in English more from the distinct "framing" of the consonants and are more flexible about hearing variations in how the vowel sounds in between are pronounced.

For example, it's the same reason that whispering (which largely takes out tone/pitch of vowel sounds) is super easy in English, but more difficult in some other languages.

As an Australian, it's Irish accents that I struggle with the most.

Scottish I can deal with, probably from watching shows like Still Game and Burnistoun.

Most other UK accents are not to difficult to understand.

One odd thing, I was watching an USA wildlife documentary that was set in South Africa. I noticed they put forced subtitles on when ever the South African's spoke in English. I found that bizarre as I've never had any trouble understanding when South Africans speak English.

https://youtu.be/o6p0W4ZsLXw

I can still barely understand the dialect where I have now lived for ~4 years. I can just about follow the topic of the conversation if I focus hard enough. And this is in the same country that I grew up in (Scotland).

It's a very isolated place, which has allowed the old language to survive till now, though it's only the older people that still speak it, and even then it's likely still closer to english than their parents spoke.

In the larger towns nearby, the dialects have turned into an accent, with a few "cool" or useful words sprinkled in. The dialect here however, has different vowel and consonant sounds, maybe 30-50% different words (I'm just guessing), and a slightly different word order. Sadly it will die out in the next decade or so.

I guess this is pretty normal in some parts of the world, but quite rare in english.

There are parts of the United States, where I am from, where the English is almost unintelligible to me. Also, I have only been to England once, for a layover that would last 24 hours. I could barely understand any of the white service workers, however the Indian service workers? I could understand them very very well.