The Relationship of White Southern Speech to Vernacular Black English

There's no tense like the present: Verbal -sinflection in early Black English

“…These researchers accept the conclusion that VBE has no present-tense marker but eschew the assumption (Fasold, 1972;Labov et al, 1968;Wolfram, 1969) that -s is a hypercorrect intrusion from SAE. VBE -s is rather an "adoption of a Standard English form without the Standard English grammatical component" (Pitts, 1981: 304).…”

“…Three types of evidence have been adduced in favour of this characterization (Fasold, 1972;Labov et al, 1968;Wolfram, 1969):…”

Variable dialect switching among African American children: Inferences about working memory

“…A dialect of English spoken by many, but not all, African Americans, AAE has proven to be a rule-governed linguistic system whose phonology, syntax and semantics are related to, yet in many ways significantly different from, those of more standard varieties of English; see Labov (1972), Wolfram (1974), Wolfram and Fasold (1974), Mufwene et al (1998), Craig and Washington (2004), Green (2002). 2 We believe that one reason for the poor performance of AAE speaking school children relative to their MAE speaking peers is that, when instructed and tested in mainstream English, AAE speaking children bear the burden of keeping separate these and many other structures in which the same or very similar grammatical pieces are used with different meanings.…”

The legitimate and illegitimate offspring of English

“…The intelligibility of these varieties must be determined not from the point of view of the educated varieties of English typically spoken by linguists but from the point of view of nonstandard varieties of English that developed among descendants of Europeans under similar conditions. Thus AA VE is more appropriately compared with nonstandard varieties of White American Southern English (e.g., Wolfram 1974;Schneider 1989 and earlier work), like African Nova Scotian English is compared with that of the local white communities (Poplack & Tagliamonte 1991Tagliamonte 1996;Tagliamonte & Poplack 1988. It is really when speakers of such related varieties say they do not understand each other that we may establish for sure that these vernaculars are not mutually intelligible.…”