The Divergence Controversy

T HE HISTORY OF THE STUDY OF the Black English Vernacular (BEV) is essentially a history of controversies.1 Initially, linguists were united in challenging the notion that BEV was the product of physiological differences between blacks and whites (the thick lips and lazy tongues theory) and then the notion that BEV was a deficient dialect, incapable of the sophisticated logical distinctions and categories that characterize higher-level discourse. Later, linguists debated among themselves, often acrimoniously, the relationships between black and white speech and the origins of BEV.2 In spite of the long and bitter polemics that developed during these latter stages, by 1982 William Labov, in the wake of the Ann Arbor decision, was able to assert that a consensus on BEV had emerged. Most linguists, he suggested, agreed that BEV is a subsystem of English which, although incorporating many features of Southern States English, has a distinct set of phonological and syntactic rules. Those rules are now aligned in many ways with the rules of other dialects but still show evidence of derivation from an earlier