Is Auvergnat like Cornish?

After seven years living in the Auvergne I still have great difficulty in being understood in French by the local population.

Over the past 25 year we have toured most of France from Brittany to the south, with very few language problems.

Here my French friends say that they don't like the south because they do not understand what people are saying.

We rarely have the same problems, perhaps because living in England, which is much smaller, with multicultural and regional accents, one becomes used to following a different accents.

The French, however, do not meet different accents on a daily basis, so the ear is not tuned to something different.

My English-speaking French friends also find that they cannot cope with anything other than accurate English. Any trace of an accent and they are lost.

Perhaps if we stay here long enough we might be able to learn Auvergnat. At the moment it sounds a little like Yorkshire, mixed with Old English, with a hint of Cornish.

Anthony Richardson
Buxieres