ABSTRACT
The creole origins issue is the older issue. The earliest linguists to suggest the possibility that AA VE had pidgin or creole roots were Schuchardt (1914), Bloomfield (1933: 474), Wise (1933), and Pardoe (1937).1 The case was articulated in more detail by Bailey (1965) and repeated in Hall (1966: 15). It was vigorously championed by Stewart (1967, 1968, 1969) and Dillard (1972, 1992), and it was subsequently endorsed by Baugh (1979, 1980, 1983), Holm (1976,1984), Rickford (1974,1977), Fasold (1976,1981), Smitherman (1977), Edwards (1980, 1991), Labov (1982), Mufwene (1983), Singler (1989, 1991a, 1991b, to appear), Traugott (1976), and Winford (1992a, 1992b, 1997), among others. Arguing against the creole hypothesis, and asserting instead that the speech of African Americans derives primarily from the dialects spoken by
British and other white immigrants in earlier times (hence the label "dialectologist") were Krapp (1924, 1925), Kurath (1928), Johnson (1930), Brooks (1935, 1985: 9-13), McDavid and McDavid (1951), McDavid (1965), Davis (1969, 1970), D'Eloia (1973), Schneider (1982, 1983, 1989, 1993b), Poplack and Sankoff (1987), Poplack and Tagliamonte (1989, 1991, 1994), Montgomery (1991), Tagliamonte and Poplack (1988, 1993), Montgomery et al. (1993), and Ewers (1996), among others. It should be added that positions are not always as polarized as these lists of creole proponents and opponents might suggest. For instance, while McDavid and McDavid (1951) felt that most AA VE features came from white speech, they recognized creole influence in the case of Gullah, and urged careful study of African and creole languages to see whether AA VE features in other areas might be traced to these. Similarly, Winford's (1997) paper is self-described as written from "a creolist perspective" - but it is one which allows for considerably more influence from British and other white dialects than creolists like Stewart and Dillard would concede. And Mufwene (1992: 158) argues that "neither the dialectologist nor the creolist positions accounts adequately for all the facts of AAE" and that new intermediate positions are necessary.
