An expanding database on earlier African American English that includes ex-slave written and spoken records as well as data from expatriate insular black speech communities has led to an extensive reexamination of the historical development of AAVE. Curiously, these investigations have often overlooked one the most diagnostic sociolinguistic situations of all-that of the longstanding, insular rural Southern black community in the United States (i.e., other than the Sea Islands where Gullah is spoken). This presentation considers data from a historically isolated community of African Americans in mainland, coastal North Carolina located by the Pamlico Sound. Many white and black families have co-existed in this remote marshland since the early 1700s, thus providing a unique laboratory for investigating critical questions about the historical status and the present-day development of AAVE. To what extent have African Americans participated historically in localized Anglo dialects? For example, do African Americans in the Pamlico Sound area speak the distinctive "Outer Banks brogue" strongly associated with their Anglo cohorts in the area (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1995, 1997)? Are there "core" AAVE features that co-exist with local dialect features? Have ethnolinguistic boundaries become more or less robust over time? These questions are considered by examining both particular diagnostic structures (e.g. copula absence, past be leveling, subject-verb concord) along with overall dialect profiles (e.g. comparative vowel systems) based on an extensive set of sociolinguistic interviews recently conducted with speakers spanning over a century in apparent time. The analysis suggests: (1) that the earlier vernacular speech of African Americans was much more localized than many contemporary versions of AAVE; (2) that AAVE has maintained long-term, selective ethnolinguistic distinctiveness even while accommodating detailed features of localized Anglo varieties; and (3) that current-day AAVE is moving toward a more expansive set of core AAVE features as it moves away from marked regional varieties associated with Anglo speakers. Explanation for this development centers on the structural dynamics of linguistic accommodation in language contact, the changing character of migration and social interaction in many African American communities, and the ethnic focusing of a common core AAVE features that has accelerated over the last half century.