Article: Shana Poplack and Sali Tagliamonte: African American English in the Diaspora.(Book Review)

Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. xxi + 293 pp.

The history of African American English (= AAE) has been a much contested playground or battlefield for linguists, especially since the 1960s. One of the difficulties was that evidence on the decisive early stages of the ethnolect was very scarce--most texts being extremely short, and prejudiced or anecdotal, and, from the nineteenth century, often "distorted" by literary uses. The importance of reliable early data is especially great because they might allow decisions, or at least plausible arguments, in favour of the hypothesis of a creole origin, or against such an assumption (the "dialect" explanation, which preferred to ...

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