Description
This is a sociolinguistic study investigating African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) in Muncie, Indian, known as Americas Middletown. Since most of the studies on the divergence/convergence of AAVE relied on apparent-time data which have been criticized for inappropriateness for investigating language change, the goal of this study was to examine, though time-depth data, whether Muncie AAVE was diverging from or converging with White Vernacular English (WVE) from 1980 to 1993. The analysis focused on 23 syntactic and 5 phonological features collected from interviews of t32 African-American subjects. Equally divided into two groups of 1980 and 1993, the subjects consisted of both young and elderly. Therefore, both real-time and apparent-time data of Muncie AAVE could be compared and analyzed. The results show that the 1993 subjects used these linguistic features consistently less frequently. The findings based on the time-depth data in this study contradict the claim that AAVE is diverging from WVE on a national level.
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