This provocative volume investigates the origins of contemporary African American Vernacular English (AAVE), one of the oldest, yet unsolved, questions in sociolinguistics.

Shana Poplack is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Linguistics and Director of the Sociolinguistics Laboratory at the University of Ottawa. An expert in linguistic variation theory and its application to diverse areas of language contact, she has published widely on code-switching, Hispanic linguistics, Canadian French, and numerous aspects of African American English. She is editor of The English History of African American English (Blackwell 1999).

Sali Tagliamonte is based at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on morph-syntactic variation and change in the evolution of English. Currently she is investigating British dialects and conducting cross-variety comparisons amongst British and North American dialects.