I'm very much looking forward to your next linguistics post. I'm especially looking forward to the language/dialect distinction, for I have the following little problem:
My native language is German (from Germany). If someone from Switzerland speaks his local dialect of German, I don't understand anything. Nothing. Nada.
On the other hand, if someone from the Netherlands speaks (slowly) in his native language, I usually get the gist of things, sometimes even more (because Dutch is not only very close to both German and English, but even more so to my native dialect).
I also remember Ann (TOC) forwarding an email that was in Swedish, with a little additional text. Guess what? I understood about 50% of the original message - and this was my very first encounter with Swedish. And - so far - my last. (Once again, there's the fact that Swedish and German are related languages...)
Btw, there's something similar going on with Italian and Spanish: Quite often, people from South Italy don't have an easy time communicating with people from the North and vice versa. Still, at least some of them are able to converse with people from Spain, each in their native language.
