African American Vernacular English is a stigmatized dialect that is still ridiculed in education and the workplace. Its speakers are coherent and intelligent communicators, but remain disadvantaged.
New research suggests that hints left in Creole languages can identify where the original speakers came from – even hundreds of years after they migrated and mixed together.
In Africa, standard English dominates in formal institutions. But in everyday usage it is supplanted by the continent’s abundance of languages – and the varieties of English these gave rise to.