Here's a nice page which has another comaprison of American and English english - the "censored page" link in the England section is the word "Cockney English" according to the author of the project. It was censored out by obscenity filters.
http://www.all-science-fair-projects.com/science_fair_projects_encyclopedia/List_of_dialects_of_the_English_languageit seems to be copied from another page found at
http://www.webster-dictionary.org/definition/List%20of%20dialects%20of%20the%20English%20language but they do not go very deep into Scotland or Wales I am afraid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accents_of_English_speakers and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_English have good descriptions of each dialect of the english language worldwide and in England in particular.
While it is true that someone from the county next door to you might sound completely different to you, i.e.: Western North Carolina vs Eastern North Carolina etc, those are differences not major enough to qualify as their own dialect. When you get down to it people in one town will speak differently than people in the very next town over as is easily evidenced by the local slang each town's teenagers use. This is not a strong enough variation to make them 2 different dialects or even accents, even if they do sound astoundingly different to each other. To an outsider they are close enough to be the same and in the major areas of linguistic classification they are. While each family in each town might speak a bit differently than their neighbor, and the inhabitants of their town might speak differently than the town next to theirs, and their collective county speaks differently than the next county over, ad nauseum, the major linguistic differences which make the dialects and accents different from one another are seperated, and grouped, into dialect maps by linguists who determined each specific major dialect and their boundries - which may or may not bleed over slightly past the lines they have drawn but the majority of those dialect speakers are within the lines. If you get down to it Houston has over a dozen different types of english spoken in it alone - vietnamese, korean, japanese, mexican, guatemalan and all the rest of the central and south american immigrants, etc. London also has easily a dozen different sounding versions of english for the same reason, including those transplanted americans who after a while sound neither all the way American nor all the way English.
Yet the major dialect boundry lines remain in place and the majority of the population within them speak, as far as the linguistic rules that determine what a dialect is, the same dialect even if the accent is slightly different or the words are slightly different here and there.
The 6 regional dialects of Wales, by the way, were the english dialects. The Welsh language itself had only 2 dialects.
Now take into account that the population of the US is at over 300 million people while the population of England is 49 million, Wales is 2.9 million and the combined population of the entire UK is 58.78 million as of the 2001 census and you are comparing the differences in english as spoken by one group of people 1/5th the size of the other group. Just isn't any way to make a genuinely fair comparison of the 2. Amount of people vs amount of people and the UK wins easily. Total amount of "local" variations of the way words are spoken and the US wins easily due to it having just a huge amount more of "locals," and the localities themselves, than the UK can lay claim to.
So the only way I can see to conclude the entire debate on the language differences is to say that total amount of differences can be given to the US through sheer numbers and size while the number of variations per population could be given to the UK for high variation within smaller numbers.
You both win. Now go have a pint. Or two.
Wish I had thought of this topic when I was writing for my degrees
Jared
