ϭϰϲ THE MARITIMES African Nova Scotian English in an Enclave This piece comprises excerpts from a book entitled African American English in the Diaspora (Oxford & Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001) by Shana Poplack (University of Ottawa) and Sal i Tagliamonte (University of Toronto). These excerpts (pp. 1, 3, 39-42, 44-45, 52-55, 63- 66) focus specifically on one of Nova Scotia’s relatively isolated African Canadian communities, Guysborough. 1 The research we report in these chapters was originally prompted by one of the oldest and as yet unsolved questions in modern sociolinguistics -- that of the origins of contemporary African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Is AAVE the descendant of some creole widespread across the southern colonies of British North America, converging over two or three centuries towards mainstream American English varieties, while conserving some traces of the original creole grammar? Or did the ancestors of today's AAVE speakers in fact learn to speak in much the same way as colonists from various regions of the British Isles? In this case, modern AAVE has actually diverged from mainstream varieties under conditions of community cohesion and segregation from the dominant society. These questions are extremely important for sociolinguistics. According to the first scenario, the evolutionary history of AAVE is a prime example of the process of decreolization, well studied throughout the Caribbean and elsewhere. But if the second scenario is more accurate, then AAVE exemplifies instead the process of divergence of related language varieties through internal evolution, but does not provide data appropriate to the study of decreolization. Perhaps even more important are the social and cultural implications of questions. 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