ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the Black Atlantic – the cultural and historical narrative of people of African origin brought to North America, the Caribbean, and to the British Isles – and some of the ways in which African American English developed out of the mix of historical forms, pidgins and creoles, and West African traditions. The chapter looks at the centrality of music and the literary imagination to the development of Black vernaculars, and it seeks to affirm the distinctive linguistic features of those vernaculars rather than measure them against “standards.” The key aim of this chapter is to understand African American English in the larger context of Black migration and an emerging cultural imagination of people of African heritage.
