African-American vernacular English

East Anglian dialects of English English had their brief moment of international academic glory in the 1960s and 1970s when the big socio-linguistic issue was the historical origins of American Nonstandard Negro English, as it was then called. To simplify rather considerably, there were two major groups of American academic linguists in competition on this issue. One group, the Creolists, argued that, to the extent that American Black Vernacular English (BVE) was linguistically different from White varieties of English, this was due to the fact that BVE had its origins in an earlier creole similar to Gullah and to the other English-based Atlantic creoles (Bailey 1965). The other group, who we can perhaps call the Dialectologists, argued that, without denying that Black and White varieties of American English differed, it was not necessary to postulate a creole history. They argued instead that differences were due to differential loss and retention of original features of British Isles English, together with subsequent independent developments (see the presentations in Dillard 1970; Burling 1973).

A number of features of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) were advanced as evidence for and against these hypotheses. As is well known, one of these was the absence from verb-forms in these varieties of third-person singular present-tense -s (see Fasold 1972). The Creolists pointed out that loss of -s represented a typical case of regularisation or simplification of the sort which often happens in language contact situations, and that the Caribbean and other Atlantic English-based creoles also demonstrated this feature. If White American speech had -s and vernacular Black varieties had zero, then this was not surprising in view of the large-scale processes of language shift, pidginisation and creolisation that the speech of the ancestors of modern Black Americans had been subject to as a result of their enforced transplantation from West Africa to slavery in the Americas (Dillard 1972).

The Dialectologists’s view (Kurath 1928) was that third-person singular present-tense zero was a feature of certain British Isles dialects, and the obvious explanation was that Black varieties had acquired and retained this original British Isles feature, while White dialects for the most part had not.