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Comment by briga | Hacker News Reader

All English speakers share a common writing system, but if you compare, say, the Scottish highland dialect with African-American Vernacular English, you get close to the point where the two variants could plausibly be considered different languages. Given time and distance the variants will only diverge further. Also notice how having a common Latin written language didn't prevent the various Romance languages from developing in Europe.

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Considering the American South was largely populated by Scots-Irish, you might be surprised. These are the people African slaves and their descendans learned English from.

Its so strange to me that people basically avoid recognizing that most African Americans simply speak a Southern dialect that has been able to persist outside the South because of de facto segregation.

As far as I know back in the olden times most people were illiterate, so having a written language wouldn't have as much of an impact as it would today.

I bet you if you locked a Scottish guy, and someone who speaks AAVE in the same room and they had to work together to escape they easily could. If you slow down AAVE it's just normal English, along with repetition to emphasize certain points. But this varies wildly based upon where in the United States you live. In Los Angeles, a lot of these black kids grow up watching anime all day so it wouldn't surprise me to see a bit of Japanese make its way into AAVE.

That’s a great example. See how Vulgar Latin split off from the written form quite early on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin

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