Oh, sure. I was being too loose—or more properly, too lay, :P—with the word dialect.

That dialect map, however academically correct it may be, is pedantic to the point of being bonkers. If there is zero grammatical variation and no chance of having vocabulary misunderstood then, to me, it cannot be considered dialect. Washingtonians and Floridians speak exactly the same English. Just because sofa and couch or soda and pop may be preferred… they are understood and nearly no one bats an eye to have them mingled. I cannot see local vocabulary like geoduck (a giant clam in the Northwest) or dolphin (a game fish in the Southeast) changing that either. It would be like considering placenames dialect. The idea that New York City English is as much a dialect as Gullah (a real dialect so localized that most Americans live and die never knowing it exists) is risible. Almost everything I wouldn’t argue about is like that: extremely limited and self-contained geographically. When I said three dialects before I was thinking Northeast, Western, and Southern/Southeast, basically falling along the major surviving meta-accent divisions.

This does return to a more interesting (in US terms, the European stuff you’ve been writing about is quite interesting) topic that I wish I knew more about: American dialects of foreign languages. You wrote about the Pennsylvania Dutch [sic] before.

There are multiple French dialects in the US, including an imported Hatian creole I only know about because a local radio station does an hour long show on Monday nights in it. The Spanish spoken in Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado has all kinds of 400 year hold-outs from the Conquistadors and contains quite a bit of English for modern words because the dialect itself was evolving too slowly. This map is extremely fun for me.

Anyway, anyone reading these discussions should probably prefer your definitions to mine. :P