I found it quite true when you look at cases like Dutch vs. Afrikaans or Swedish vs Norwegian vs Danish. Declaring your dialect a "language" can be a tool of nationalism.
As counterexample I would still call American English and Brazilian Portuguese dialects, even though they have armies and navies. I'm not sure if I would call Afrikaans a dialect.
I think the key point is that no-one is being marked incorrect at school or told they are stupid etc. for using American spellings instead of "correct" British English spellings (or other language features). Probably the war of independence between the countries marking an important boundary for when those things changed.
My mother-in-law apologizes for accidentally using "slang" terms in front of my children, mostly because she was taught at school that her language was 'incorrect' and it was suppressed in favour of the 'correct' dialect of the ruling class who lived in another country.
Frisian is an official language recognized by the Dutch government and the EU, in fact it is one of the two official languages of the Netherlands. It is taught in schools and spoken at official policy meetings.
Nonetheless, your point still stands as I'm sure there are valid examples of 'no army, is dialect'
Good examples, but "Afrikaans has no army" is debatable and IMHO misleading. It doesn't share an army with Dutch. And in the formative period from the Boer wars (1880, 1899) to 1994 I would say that it did have an army in absolute terms.
When I studied linguistics, dialects were simply defined as regional variants of a language (and that includes the "central" dialect, which many would equate with the language itself), while an accent was what a non-native speaker would get (e.g. "English with German accent"). Whether some dialect rose to the political status of language, was a political question, and not really something for linguists to worry about until they took a course on sociology.
The way the word "accent" is used by most non-linguist English speakers, I'd say you're mostly right: People will say things like "she's got a Southern accent" – when she was born and raised in the South, speaking that same regional variant of the language that her parents spoke, ie. speaking that dialect.
I heard that expressed as "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an...
I found it quite true when you look at cases like Dutch vs. Afrikaans or Swedish vs Norwegian vs Danish. Declaring your dialect a "language" can be a tool of nationalism.