The sociohistorical and linguistic development of African American English in Virginia and South Carolina

This dissertation examines the sociohistorical and linguistic conditions surrounding the emergence of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in 17th and 18th century Virginia and South Carolina. The Works Project Administration (WPA) ex-slave narratives were selected as the most valuable linguistic source of earlier AAVE in these regions. The WPA datasets are also compared to other potential sources of earlier AAVE such as African American diaspora varieties, the Hoodoo Texts and the Archive of Folk Songs (AFS) ex-slave recordings. Sociohistorical evidence for this dissertation consists of secondary sources from historians and population statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Census.;Available linguistic evidence of zero copula patterns, invariant be, and past been examined in this dissertation suggest that AAVE's history is diverse consisting of a number of confluent and divergent paths of development. Many original constructions have all but died out (Ise, Ise am, he/she am , bin + uninflected verb). Others, which may have been marginal in earlier AAVE (zero + gon, invariant be as a habitual/stative marker, and continuative perfect been), have become robust in current AAVE. Although the earlier AAVE varieties of Virginia and South Carolina share these linguistic traits with present day AAVE, these traits appear to be less restructured and occur less frequently in earlier AAVE. I argue that the foundation of these linguistic structures in AAVE were laid in colonial Virginia and South Carolina by African and European populations in the 17th and 18th centuries. In Virginia, a modestly restructured AAVE dialect emerged, particularly in the eastern part of the colony. In the eastern interior of South Carolina, a considerably restructured AAVE variety developed, falling on a structural continuum between the creole, Gullah, a product of coastal South Carolina, and the Black variety which developed concurrently though independently in Virginia.