User:The Editor's Apprentice/Notes on African American Language

This page is designed to house personal notes on the study and documentation of African American Language, "the language [varieties] most associated with Black Americans who are the descendants of enslaved people."

Content

 * I am unable to differentiate to almost any degree formal and informal registers of African American Language. My ability to understand the meaning of African American Language is little and mostly based on guesses rather than knowledge. Sociolinguistic information is not easily ascertainable from corpus linguistic methods, even when evaluating languoids I am more familiar with. Given that, it is presumptuous to mark any instances of African American Language as "vernacular" or otherwise informal. The general "African American Language" or similar is more honest to my level of understanding.
 * The distinctness of African American Language is due to systematic segregation (both de jure and de facto), isolation from other ethnicities, as well as cultural identity and heritage.
 * The lead to the establishment of many instances of contemporary African American Language in urban areas.
 * African American language in places with significant preexisting African American populations experienced less change due to the Great Migration.
 * African American Language is not homogeneous nor disunited, even among places where it was shaped by the Great Migration as variation of African American Language already existed in the US South East and each instance has continued to develop.
 * Instances of African American Language established following the Great Migration are not descendant of the language spoken by White people in those places. Differences in phonology are some of the most obvious evidence for such.