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 kinda was like Guangdong province where I’m from. Mandarin wasn’t used at home, but once school started, it was all Mandarin. Nowadays… I think Mandarin is slowly starting to take over.
It’s why the immigrant parent’s kids who never went to school in China cannot speak Mandarin, I know kids that only speak like Fuzhouese.