To make up for what is, in retrospect, a lop-sided picture of AAVE,
linguists have been looking more closely at the wider African American
community, most specifically at the middle classes (Anderson and
Middleton 2005; Kautzsch 2002; Kendall and Wolfram 2009; Wassink
2004; Weldon 2008). Kendall and Wolfram (2009) lay out a
comprehensive blueprint for a more inclusive sampling across the full
range of speech acts that compose what might be called the African
American linguistic marketplace (Wolfram, forthcoming). This reasonable
and perhaps too-long-put-off shift of focus takes into account the growth
of an African American middle class and in parallel, the evolution of what
has been called African American Standard English (AASE) (Spears 2009:
3), African American English (AAE) or Black Standard English (BSE)
(Taylor 1983). Given the tendency to focus too closely on one aspect of the
larger picture, Wolfram cautions against absolute dichotomies:
Weldon’s study exposes spurious dichotomies such as the nominal
distinction between standard and vernacular African American
English; it also raises questions about the role of personal
presentation and audience in public speeches, including the extent of
stylistic shift, performative code-switching, and the persistence of
vernacular variants in the speech of some prominent African
Americans in more formal public settings with mainstream, public
audiences.
(Wolfram 2011)There is a great deal of regional and social variation in AAVE. The
language of African Americans living in the rural South is different from
that of the Latino- and Anglo Americans who live alongside them, but it is
also different from the AAVE spoken in urban centers in the South (Cukor-
Avila 2001, 2003; Green 2002; Rickford 2010; Wolfram 2007). With
increasing wealth and the growth of the Black middle class, the
community becomes more socially complex, and AAVE keeps pace.
Of these grammatical features (which are not exclusive to the African
American language community, please keep this in mind), only the use of
what as a relative pronoun seems to be disappearing from both urban and
rural AAVE. Other features (negative inversion, regularized past form)
seem solid regardless of the setting. More relevant still, Wolfram (2004c)