Wolfram

I copied straight from the text, but this is what I would have highlighted if I had a print copy of this.

 * The Anglicist Hypothesis: AAE could be traced to the samesources as earlier European American dialects, the dialects of English spoken in the British Isles. According to this historical scenario, slaves brought a number of different African languages with them when they were transported, but over the course of a couple of generations these were replaced by the English varieties spoken by their regional cohorts, with only a few minor traces of the ancestral languages remaining.
 * The Creolist Hypothesis: AAE developed from a creole language that was fairly widespread in the antebellum South. This creole was not unique to the mainland South; it showed anumber of similarities to well-known English-based creoles in the African diaspora. It is maintained that this creole was fairly widespread among peopleof African descent on Southern plantations but was not spoken to any extent by whites. Contact with other dialects in the US eventually led this creole language to be modiﬁed, according to the hypothesis, so that it became more closely alignedwith other varieties of English in the process of decreolization whereby creolefeatures are gradually replaced by non-creole features.
 * The Neo-Anglicist Hypothesis is like the Anglicist Hypothesis in maintain-ing that earlier, postcolonial African American speech was directly linkedto the early British dialects brought to North America. However, the Neo-Anglicist position acknowledges that AAE has since diverged so that it is nowquite distinct from contemporary European American vernacular speech. “AAVE [African American Vernacular English] originated as English, but as the African American community solidiﬁed, itinnovated speciﬁc features” so that “contemporary AAVE is the result of evo-lution, by its own unique, internal logic.”
 * The Substrate Hypothesis maintains that even though earlier AAE may have incorporated many regional dialect features, enduring substrate effects have consistently distinguished it from other varieties of American English. In this respect, the position differs from the Neo-Anglicist position, which arguesthat earlier AAE was identical to earlier European American English.
 * Part of what it means to speakAAE is not only the use of features associated with it, but the avoidance offeatures associated with regional and standard “white speech.”
 * On this note, I just keep thinking, maybe the avoidance of "white speech" is one way to maintain original culture. Culture continuously changes and eventually can become extinct. Speaking with a different dialect may be one way to preserve culture for people. ~Ruby

I went along the same lines as Ruby and took out some key quotes that I found interesting throughout the article and that helped me to understand it a little better:


 * Given a randomly selected set of audio recordings whose content contains so culturally identifying material, listeners can accurately identify African American speakers 80% of the time


 * Socially, demographic factors such as status, region and level of education affect listener's perceptions of ethnic identity, as do interactional factors such as interlocutors and speech setting.


 * Region, status & other sociocultural attributes are also important in determining the structural relationship of AAE to comparable European American vernacular varieties


 * Camoflaged forms:** Bear surface resemblance to constructions found in other varieties of English, but they are used differently


 * Uniqueness of AAE lies more in the particular combination of structures that make up the dialect than it does in a restricted set of potentially unique structures

__Hypothesis:__ Phonetic differences rather than grammatical differences, including differences in vowel pronunciation and voice quality may have as much to do with the perceptual determination of ethnicity as differences in grammatical structures


 * Studies of urban AAE in the last couple of decades support the contention that some AAE structures are intensifying rather than receding and are developing new structures


 * The center of African American youth culture today is primarily urban, and many models for behavior, including language, seem to radiate outward from these urban cultural centers

__Conclusion:__ Differing local situations underscore the significance of the social dynamics and the geographical location of a community in understanding the past and present development of AAE

" Though it is possible to compare structures used by European Americanand African American speakers on an item-by-item basis, the picture thatemerges from this approach does not fully represent the true relationship between AAE and **other varieties**."

Does he mean other varieties of English? Because one thing about this article that really struck me was the idea that white speakers tend to speak o ne kind of English and black speakers tend to speak another, but I would say that age, gender, social class, and location among other factors play a huge role in shaping the way that everyone talks. He does try to address this, but just mentioning it in a paragraph does not do justice to the undermining qualities that all these factors have to any evaluation of how different social groups (whether designated by race or other features) converse with each other.

Also, I think many people speak differently depending on their audience, adding to the melting pot effect of social interaction on speech tendencies. I'm not saying you can't evaluate this "variety" of English as a whole, because you can but I think we should be cautious about how heavily we weigh investigations in this manner, because I don't find the data presented to be very concrete or informative.