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
Edit: thanks everyone, and clearly I didn’t think of certain parts of the UK when I was in the shower and thought of this…
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.