Are there any mutually unintelligible English dialects? So far I've only been able to learn is that English is highly intelligible among its different dialects, but no actual statement that all dialect are mutually intelligible.
Learn English – Are there any mutually unintelligible English dialects
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There are way too many English dialects to list, but the general definition of a dialect is:
Dialects are linguistic varieties which differ in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar from each other and from Standard English (which is itself a dialect).
I actually did find a simplified tree of English dialects, and it shows the changes that occurred between one and the next.
There's also a dialect map for the US, which shows which regions share an overall dialect.
The website that the map is from gives a very detailed look at each individual dialect. There is too much to post here, but for example the site lists the New England dialect--and then breaks it down into sub-dialects:
New England
Many of the Northern dialects can trace their roots to this dialect which was spread westward by the New England settlers as they migrated west. It carries a high prestige due to Boston's early economic and cultural importance and the presence of Harvard University. A famous speaker is Katherine Hepburn. They sometimes call doughnuts cymbals, simballs, and boil cakes.
However, the dialects shown are only dialects of American English. Pittsburgh English, the dialect you originally asked about, is listed as a North American regional dialect of English.
Taken from Wikipedia:
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y'all, or you all - southern United States and African American Vernacular English
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you guys - U.S., particularly in the Midwest, Northeast, and West Coast; Canada, Australia. Used regardless of the genders of those referred to
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you lot - UK
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yous(e) - Ireland, Tyneside, Merseyside, Central Scotland
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youse guys - in the U.S., particularly in New York City region, Philadelphia, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan; also spelt without the E
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you-uns/yinz - Western Pennsylvania, The Appalachians
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ye/yee/yees - Ireland, Tyneside
Best Answer
Two considerations need to be taken into account, I think. One is accent/pronunciation. The first time I saw Letter to Brezhnev, a 1985 film set in Liverpool, I repeatedly wished during the opening 20 minutes or so that the film had included subtitles because I found it so difficult to understand what the actors were saying. But after a while, I got used to the (consistent) differences in pronunciation from what I was accustomed to hearing, and I could understand most of the dialogue quite well the rest of the way.
The second consideration is vocabulary. To the extent that a dialect incorporates multiple unknown words, it is impossible to fully comprehend speech in that dialect unless you can look up the unknown words or ask the speaker what they mean.
Here is a quotation I recently encountered from James Hogg, The Three Perils of Man; or, War, Women, and Witchcraft (1822), spoken by a farmer who lives on the border of Scotland and England:
I would venture to guess that very few English speakers could accurately translate four of the words that appear in close proximity in that excerpt—titty, tafferel, tawpies, and gaindering—and many might also have trouble with "didna ken whilk."
An English speaker would surely recognize the wording here as being (from their perspective) "mostly English"—but if several crucial words in a small amount of space are unknown to the reader, the sentence is, for practical purposes, unintelligible. And as goes the sentence, so goes the dialect.