In response to the flood of interest in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) following the recent controversy over "Ebonics," this book brings together sixteen essays on the subject by a leading expert in the field, one who has been researching and writing on it for a quarter of a century.

John R. Rickford is the Martin Luther King Centennial Professor of Linguistics and African and Afro-American Studies at Stanford University. He is also the Director of the thirty-year-old degree-granting Program in African and Afro-American Studies, and President of the International Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles, and several books, including Dimensions of a Creole Continuum (1987), editor of A Festival of Guyanese Words (1978), Sociolinguistics and Pidgin-Creole Studies (1988), and co-editor of Analyzing Variation in Language (1987).