What dialect is that?

[tarvos]

While travelling through Sweden this morning, I had to ask the train manager for help (my sleeper was late and I needed a new connection to get to my destination.) To my surprise, he asked me what dialect of Swedish I spoke.

I said no dialect, I'm Dutch, but I've been spending so much time in Finland that maybe there's some Finland Swedish mixed in. (If there is, that would be funny).

Has anyone ever asked you what dialect of a language you spoke? Why? What were the assumptions behind it?

Jeff_lindqvist is not allowed to laugh because he's seen this happen to me in his presence...

[Sonjaconjota]

Not exactly the same situation, but I've got a related anecdote.
I've learned Spanish in Catalonia. It's the only place in Spain where I've ever lived, and everybody in my surroundings speaks Spanish with a Catalan accent.
Many years ago, I went on a trip to the Basque country with my boyfriend and another couple.
During our time there, we visited some museum or tourist attraction, I don't really remember which one, and they were recollecting data about where their visitors came from. So, the person at the entrance asked something like "Where are you from?", but I didn't understand them, so I asked "What?" = "¿Qué?". And the person said: "Ah, from Catalonia!"
As far as I remember, it was some place with free entrance, so that was the first and only word I had uttered so far.

[PeterMollenburg]

Dialect, no. Accent, yes.

This happened to me just last week again, to my disappointment (my ego likes the idea of sounding like a complete native Frenchman, but I've had to relinquish this somewhat, you know, let's be at least a little realistic, PM). I took the kids to their swimming lessons last week and to my surprise after they were off playing with some other kids in the water a short distance away, they came back and were speaking French with another child. I then met her mother who said she was a little perplexed by my accent when speaking French and was trying to work out where I was from, but ascertained that it wasn't France. I've had Belgium before and 'unsure' before as well. Well, I guess at least they're not jumping to 'Australian', so that's better than worse case scenario, but it appears with some time away from consistent French study that my accent has slipped a little. Well, at least the monolingual wasteland in which I live hasn't been too bad of late, I even spoke quite a bit of French the other day on the phone to a French friend who lives 45 min away (I don't get many opportunities to speak my TLs).

[Cainntear]

Dialect, no. Accent, yes.

Same here. I've had Gaelic speakers looking kind of quizzically at my and then ask where I'm from, and when I say where (a non-Gaelic-speaking area) they generally follow-up by asking where my parents are from, cos they're still trying to place the accent as they haven't quite twigged that I'm a learner.

[Iversen]

When I travelled through Britain on interrail in the mid 70s I was accused of being Welsh - and I had never been there so I don't know why. In Austria in Klagenfurt I was assumed to be from Kärnten by a reporter who interviewed people in the street, and in Strasbourg I spoke to a museum employee who started to rattle off a lot of village names in the neighbourhood, and when I told her that I actually didn't live there she assumed that I lived there, but maybe came from some other place in France. But those are the exceptions. My main force is not to speak like native speakers of any language (except Danish, of course), and I think that I speak with some kind of Iversen accent in all of my languages. However when I have stayed somewhere a couple of days my pronunciation starts to slide towards the variant I hear around me, and that is good enough for me.

PS: Finnish Swedish is easy to recognize - that's the kind where the stress is on the first syllable in all words...

[tarvos]

When I travelled through Britain on interrail in the mid 70s I was accused of being Welsh - and I had never been there so I don't know why. In Austria in Klagenfurt I was assumed to be from Kärnten by a reporter who interviewed people in the street, and in Strasbourg I spoke to a museum employee who started to rattle off a lot of village names in the neighbourhood, and when I told her that I actually didn't live there she assumed that I lived there, but maybe came from some other place in France. But those are the exceptions. My main force is not to speak like native speakers of any language (except Danish, of course), and I think that I speak with some kind of Iversen accent in all of my languages. However when I have stayed somewhere a couple of days my pronunciation starts to slide towards the variant I hear around me, and that is good enough for me.

PS: Finnish Swedish is easy to recognize - that's the kind where the stress is on the first syllable in all words...

That's Finns speaking Swedish. Actual Finland Swedish doesn't have pitch accent though...

Source: my travels in Finland

[vonPeterhof]

Back in middle school I was in an advanced English group where most of the students had spent at least a semester studying in an English-speaking country, and one time we got a new native speaker teacher from South Africa. He had us all briefly introduce ourselves, after which he'd take a guess as to which region of the US or the UK each of us learned English in, usually with surprising accuracy. I happened to be the only person in the group who at that time hadn't spent more than a month in any country other than Kazakhstan or Russia and only had the vaguest idea of the broad differences between the standard pronunciations of the UK and the US, and after I introduced myself he asked "did you happen to live in the Netherlands?"

More recently, when I was traveling through Uzbekistan in March, I stopped for lunch in a restaurant in Bukhara. In that restaurant the way to pay was to come to the counter after you finish and tell them the number of your table, after which they would pull up your check. At that moment I couldn't remember the exact standard Uzbek pronunciation of my table's number, so I basically just took the Kazakh numerals and mentally converted them to something vaguely Uzbek-sounding. The guy at the counter looked at me and asked me if I was from Tashkent. Unfortunately I can't be 100% certain if he was basing this conclusion on how I said the number (I'm not very knowledgeable about Uzbek dialects, but AFAIK the area around Tashkent historically had a large Kazakh population, while Bukhara still has a majority of its population bilingual in Uzbek and Tajik) or on something else, like my appearance.

[Le Baron]

As others not dialect, but accent. I've just been to Italy (Vicenza and Naples) and in my attempt to speak Italian to my host's friends they detected French intonation. I always thought I was trying to speak Italian with Spanish intonation! The only reason they thought I could speak at all was because I was nodding along to the discussion (I can't really speak Italian).

[PeterMollenburg]

Dialect, no. Accent, yes.

they generally follow-up by asking where my parents are from, cos they're still trying to place the accent as they haven't quite twigged that I'm a learner.

Ah, yes. I've had this as well.

However when I have stayed somewhere a couple of days my pronunciation starts to slide towards the variant I hear around me

For this reason, I'm not concerned with my accent, well provided it's pretty decent. I guess I mean that I'm not concerned with rather minkr differences with my accent. I know that with time 'on location' (in this case, in France for French), my accent will shift to more native-like, as I will consciously make changes to anything I detect as not like the locals.

[tarvos]

When it comes to French the moment I say numbers they know I'm a Belgian French speaker anyway - I refuse to say soixante-dix or quatre-vingts-dix, and say septante and nonante instead. And there's a few Belgian words I would use too that give away that I learned in Brussels.