The other day I had my first conversation after one and half a year working with Bèrto ëd Sèra who you might know from the Piedmontese Wikipedia - among others he also spoke Neapolitan with me and: he can do this really well having his accent and so one understands that it is a learnt language for him and not the mothertongue. Strange enough I had a problem myself. I speak Neapolitan most of the time with my husband, neighbours, people here in the city and it is normal for me to simply do so. The strange thing is: hearing him talking with that accent I had the same reaction people had at the beginning when I came here when talking with me. I had like a mental block - even if I wanted: no word in Neapolitan would come out of my mouth. I had to speak either Italian or English. I believe that is what many people here have as a reaction ... only when you are considered to be part of the place where you live they talk "their language" with you.
This also shows me another thing: our less resourced linguistic entities need help - a lot of help - they need to become languages like all others that people learn and where people (me included) will not have that mental block that does not allow you to speak that language ...
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I few years ago I lived in Germany and started to learn German in order to help make life a bit easier and more enjoyable for myself. After a few weeks of lessons I could string together what I thought was a reasonable sentence, the words were right and the other people in my class learning German could understand me perfectly. So I tried speaking German with the people I worked with and they just stared at me blankly. It took several more months for this reaction to go away as I developed a more easily understood German accent.
I think German people perhaps had trouble understanding me because they are not so used to foreigners speaking German, they would normally just use English. For whatever reason English people don't speak as many foreign languages as the rest of Europeans but do seem to have a greater ability to understand their own language when it is spoken with strange grammar or with an unusual accent, probably because so many people speak English as a second language.
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