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…
I can still barely understand the dialect where I have now lived for ~4 years. I can just about follow the topic of the conversation if I focus hard enough. And this is in the same country that I grew up in (Scotland).
It’s a very isolated place, which has allowed the old language to survive till now, though it’s only the older people that still speak it, and even then it’s likely still closer to english than their parents spoke.
In the larger towns nearby, the dialects have turned into an accent, with a few “cool” or useful words sprinkled in. The dialect here however, has different vowel and consonant sounds, maybe 30-50% different words (I’m just guessing), and a slightly different word order. Sadly it will die out in the next decade or so.
I guess this is pretty normal in some parts of the world, but quite rare in english.