home

What's the difference between African American English (AAE) and African American Vernacular English (AAVE)? -From what I can tell they are basically the same thing. AAE is the more recent term but AAVE is still used

There are several Diaspora communities in North America including: Nova Scotia, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, Alabama and the Dominican Republic. Nova Scotia, for example, was settled by Black Loyalists after the revolutionary war and refugee slaves from the war of 1812.

__Diaspora__- Movement, migration or scattering of people from an established homeland. (E.g. Jewish Diaspora after Babylonian exile). __Cognate__- Words that have the same etymological origin __Relic area__- Areas of geographic and social isolation in which language is still close to original form __Areal Feature__-Typological feature shared by languages in the same geographic area. __Strong Verb__- Strong verbs are the very common verbs like be, go, run and take, to name a few, that do not form the past tense by adding -ed to the stem. Instead, strong verbs change at least the vowel and sometimes the entire stem: //was/were for be; went for go; ran for run; took for take; begin for start; build for make.// __Copula__ - a word used to link the subject of a sentence with a predicate (i.e. a linking verb). __Negative Concord__ - a double negative or multiple negation. __Diachronic__ - happening over time (as opposed to synchronic, or happening at the same time). __Adstratum__ (including adstrate or adstratal) - refers to a language which is equal in prestige to another. __Diaspora__ - the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland.
 * Terms:**

==== **Thesis Statemen**t(?): the varieties of English originally acquired by the ancestors of AAVE speakers ... may well have been much like those spoken by the British who colonized the United States. ====

====**Poplack is attempting to** "provid[e] an empirical answer to the question of how English became African American English" by "combine methods of his- torical comparative linguistics and variationist sociolinguistics to //reconstruct// an earlier stage of AAE". ====

====**He is refuting**: "  The synchronic focus has served to highlight the differences between AAVE and mainstream English. These, coupled with the disappearance of many of the key forms, have led linguists down the garden path of seeking and elaborating complicated external explanations for their development, in an (otherwise laudable) attempt to legitimate features they had previously claimed were incompletely or incorrectly acquired." ====

====**And concluding tha**t: " many of the features today considered nonstandard were not //created//, as would be expected if they had resulted from prior creolization or incomplete acquisition. On the contrary, they were retained from an older stage of English. The results of this research rightly legitimate early AAE as a conservative rather than an incorrect variety of English – one whose core grammatical differences appear to reside largely in its resistance to ongoing mainstream change." ==== 