ABSTRACT

Two issues loom large in discussions of the development of African-American vernacular English (AAVE). The first is the "creole origins issue" - the question of whether AAVE's predecessors, two or three hundred years ago, included creole languages similar to Gullah (spoken on the islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia) or the English-based Creoles of Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Hawaii, or Sierra Leone. The second is the "divergence issue" - the question of whether AAVE is currently becoming more different from white vernacular dialects in the US.