Additional context:
Native speakers of my mother tongue do not all understand each other due to some pretty extreme dialects. Now that I’m in Europe, I’ve noticed multiple instances of people sometimes not understand the dialect of someone from a village 10-20 km away…
In contrast, for example most American, British, and Australian people can just… understand each other like that?? I never thought much about it before but it’s pretty incredible
Yue Chinese（粵語）(the most comment variant thereof is known as: “Cantonese”（廣東話）) is not a “dialect”, its a totally mutually unintelligible language.
But unfortunately, as the saying goes: “A language is a dialect with a flag and army”
There was some rumor / urban legend that Cantonese nearly became the national language by one vote, I have no idea how true that is, maybe just a myth lol.
But like I like Cantonese so much better, like a Chair in Mandarin is 椅子 (yi3 zhi1), in Cantonese is 櫈 (dang3); because there are more tones and more initials + finals combination, there are oveall more sounds possible to pronounce, therefore you can have one syllabel words, while the Northerner Variant (aka: Mandarin) has less syllabels, which means, it just sucks. I’m a native speaker to both and Mandarin sounds so harsh for some reason… always sounds like everyong is so serious… (to be fair, Cantonese also reminds me of my parents yelling… but it sometimes can sounds very hearwarming, like 海闊天空 (song) is my favorite thing to listen to in Cantonese)
There are so much colloquiel sayings that are impossible to convert to Mandarin (or would otherwise sound so weird and wrong).
Can we start a hashtag thing?
#SaveYueChinese (it’s better than Mandarin)
That’s why it’s odd to call it a dialect, yet by definition it is, mostly because it’s spoken by the similar ethnic group that originated from the same or neighbouring region, and by that definition mandarin is a dialect as well, just that china decided to make it a common language of the chinese. Like 粤语, it’s originated from guan dong but in china it’s a dialect, yet in british era hong kong it’s their common language. The same thing for 闽南语 in taiwan, which originated from fu jian.
But even though it’s different, if you know multiple dialect you can actually roughly understand the dialect you don’t know. Well, roughly.
RIP Beyond.