Reexamining the Development of African American English: Evidence from Isolated Communities

Despite extensive research over the past several decades, a number of issues concerning the development of AFRICAN AMERICAN VERNACULAR ENGLISH (AAVE) remain unresolved. These include the regional accommodation of earlier African American speech; the sources of its current, distinctive structural features; and the past and present trajectory of change. To address these questions, this study examines several longstanding, isolated biracial sociolinguistic situations in the coastal and the Appalachian regions of North Carolina. One of these situations involves a core community of African Americans, whereas two of the situations involve case studies of isolated speakers. A comparison of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for speakers representing different generations of African Americans and baseline European American speakers suggests that extensive accommodation to localized dialects characterized earlier African American speech. At the same time, the maintenance of an exclusive subset of dialect features suggests persistent substrate influence and long-term ethnolinguistic distinctiveness along with local dialect accommodation. Younger African Americans in some historically isolated rural regions appear to be moving away from the localized dialects toward a more generalized AAVE norm.