What can the language in enclaves today in the African American diaspora tell us about the history of African American English (AAE)? My talk focuses on the language of the descendants of the 16,000 African Americans who immigrated to Liberia in the nineteenth century. It concentrates on the Liberian Settler English of Sinoe (LSE-S), a county that was originally established as Mississippi-in-Africa in 1838.

Recognizing the provenance of particular features in LSE-S is rarely problematic. For example, the distribution of LSE-S features both in other varieties of English and within LSE-S itself makes it possible to identify (a) below as a feature that the Sinoe Settlers brought with them from America and (b) as a post-immigration borrowing.

a. The habitual AUX 'dor'
'Government pay me for true. I dor get check.'
b. The non-punctual AUX 'de'
'Every year, it de be a disease comes on the chicken.'

However, to extrapolate historical AAE from a modern variety from an African American diaspora enclave, one must consider two sociohistorical questions:

1. What kind of AAE did the original African American emigrants speak?
2. What factors in the history of a particular enclave community might have moved that community's language away from the language that the original emigrants had brought with them from the US?

(It is their failure to provide historically informed answers to these two questions that crucially undermines the work on African American enclave varieties in the Dominican Republic and Canada by Poplack (2000) and Poplack & Tagliamonte (2001).) I present the demographics of the original Sinoe Settlers (80% came from the Lower South) and then argue that the forces and factors likely to push LSE-S closer to Standard English, while not non-existent, were weaker than was true elsewhere. At the same time, I argue that ongoing hostility between the Sinoe Settlers and their indigenous neighbors as well as the status differential between the two groups sharply limited influence upon LSE-S from local languages -- including the pidginized English vernacular of the West African coast.

I apply the LSE-S evidence to the two controversies that dominate the study of African American English: the convergence/divergence and creolization/dialectology debates.