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Location: Near Tours, France about 47°10'N 0°25'E
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Originally Posted by xander.XVII
Italy is way more fragmented than France, hence it comes the much higher linguistic and cultural difference among people even within a few km.
France used to be extremely fragmented until the first decades of the 20th century: for those interested to listen those dialects and languages in their diversity:
Since as the child of immigrants Macedonian is not my native language, I am more sensitive to regional variations. The language of southwest Macedonia is very easy for me to understand and to speak. 10 miles south in Greece, it is virtually the same words but the dialect is so muddy sounding that it makes it hard for me to understand.
Likewise when I hear "proper" Macedonian such as watching something on the news. It is very difficult for me to follow, but when they interview the "man on the street" it becomes much easier.
Likewise with Croatian, Serbian and Bulgarian. The formal dialect is virtually impossible for me to understand, but when they interview the "man on the street" it is very easy to follow but not 100%.
Rita Wilson (Tom Hanks' wife) was trying to trace her father's heritage. It sounds like he was a Pomak (Bulgarian Muslim). They did a TV show on NBC (I believe it's online) where she tracked down a still-surviving brother of her dad's. (It was presented as being a surprise, but I'm sure that was just to make the TV show interesting.) She went to their village in Greece and tracked the brother down to Bulgaria and went there ...... I understood her uncle pretty well but not perfectly.
The Slavic dialects spoken in the Ottoman vilayets in the region of Macedonia in the 19th century were considered to be part of the Bulgarian language. It didn't become it's "own language" until the early 1900's when the Bulgarian revolutionary movement splintered
On the other hand, long before the Slavs settled the Balkans, the ancient Macedonians were Greeks and spoke a northern Greek dialect
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