In college we had diagrams that showed just were some of the American dialects change and I had concrete proof of one of those borders. my mother and two of her sisters lived in different part of the U.S. after they married. Her two sisters were less than 50 miles apart, but they used some words and pronunciations completely differently. One them pronounced "rinse" as "wrench" and "furniture" as "fur-ni-tour".
But for me the English/American variances are special. I lived and started school in England, but came back to the U.S. in 1960. I was in second grade, and my grandmother in TX could not understand me at all. Between different names for everything in the store and asking to "go to the pub for an icelolly", I might as well have been speaking French or German. She understood "pub" though. For her it was only as a place for drinking alcohol which she didn't even allow in her house even for adults, much less a 7 yr old. She really didn't care what an "icelolly" was that afternoon.
