The different population ecologies of slavery-era America necessitate
an investigation into the issue of regional variation in Early African
American English (AAE). This article addresses this issue through the
Ottawa Repository of Early African American Correspondence, a
corpus of letters written by semiliterate African American settlers in
Liberia between 1834 and 1866. We investigate nonstandard verbal
-s and its conditioning by linguistic and social factors,
including each writer's regional origin in the United States. Results
show that, despite differences in overall rates across regions, the
linguistic conditioning largely remains constant. These results suggest
that subtle regional distinctions in Early AAE existed when specific
settlement and population ecologies encouraged them, but that the shared
history and circumstances of language contact and development led to an
overall identity of forms and conditioning factors across regional
varieties.The data on which this study is
based are taken from the Ottawa Repository of Early African American
Correspondence (OREAAC; Van Herk & Poplack,
2003), housed in the Sociolinguistics Laboratory at the University
of Ottawa. Financial support was provided by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada in the form of a postdoctoral
fellowship to the first author. Earlier versions of the analyses reported
here were presented at meetings of the American Dialect Society (Chicago,
January 2000) and the Canadian Linguistics Association (University of
Toronto, June 2002). We thank the audiences at these presentations for
their comments and suggestions, and we thank Shana Poplack and two
anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Any
remaining errors are our own responsibility.