> Now, I don't speak Italian myself, but this is the complete opposite of what you'll hear from pretty much any youtube polyglot who talks about Italian. In fac

> Now, I don't speak Italian myself, but this is the complete opposite of what you'll hear from pretty much any youtube polyglot who talks about Italian. In fact, the conclusion I've gained from them is that Italian dialects are extremely difficult for native Italian speakers from different regions to understand, which is precisely why there is a standardised Italian today. In the paragraph you quote, antirez was speaking about standardised Italian, not about dialects (he refers to them in the preceding paragraph). There are still differences in standardised Italian as spoken in different geographical regions, but they're minor ones and don't really impact intelligibility - the most noticeable ones are that Southerners use the simple past whereas Northerners stick to the present perfect; some vowels are stressed differently, and Italian Switzerland has a bunch of calques from French and German. Oh, and in the North we use the definite article with women in the third person, for some reason. On paper it doesn't look too far from the differences between American and British English, but the phonetic difference is minuscule by comparison. No Sicilian is going to have such a strong accent while speaking standard Italian that an Aostan has trouble understanding him.