[zorked]

Basically any language has that many dialects - or many more. English has a ton of unintelligible dialects but you won't hear them on CNN/Hollywood and speakers of those dialects will adjust to a more standardized form of the language to talk to outsiders. Remember that the Caribbean, Africa, etc. all speak English and it's not American/British that they speak. Even traveling in (super-small and birthplace of the language) Great Britain will expose you to a lot of dialects even if locals will swap to a regularized language to talk to you...

[Swizec]

Yep. My point isn’t that Slovenian, German et al are special in having many dialects. Slovenian has way many for such a small language, but all languages have them.

What’s interesting about English is the relative lack of dialects outside the UK. It’s already a very standardized lingua franca because of how it spread.

And what’s left is solvable with the BBC/Hollywood English. Similar to how germany has hoch deutsch – an invented standard dialect everyone learns in school.

You can have a standard form of English taught in schools without demanding say-to-day stabdardization in common use. And we kinda already do. Just unofficially.