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…
Every dialect has their own words for things
I had associated that with only localization and slang. Didnt realize that was dialect. That being said, you can still understand the words just and get enough cintext to realize you dont say “fanny” in UK
Tbh where the line is between dialects and languages is a hotly debated topic in linguistics, or if there even is a line