Regional differentiation is one of the primitive factors in dialect differences and a natural starting point in the examination of language variation. 1 As is often the case for African American speech, however, the role of regionality in African American Language (AAL) has turned out to be controversial and open to debate. In fact, Wolfram (see Wolfram 2007, this volume) observes that the role of regional differentiation in AAL has often been misunderstood and misrepresented by sociolinguists, leading to one of the major sociolinguistic myths about AAL—The Homogeneity Myth. According to this myth, there is uniformity in AAL in the United States and in the African diaspora in which regionality is invariably trumped by ethnicity. In racialized, popular culture, it is often assumed that “all Black folks talk the same way,” but there is also a more sophisticated version of the homogeneity assumption in which sociolinguists maintain that there is a uniform core in the vernacular speech of African Americans throughout the United States. As William Labov, arguably the most influential voice on AAL over the last half century, put it relatively early in his descriptive account of AAL:

By the “Black English vernacular” we mean the relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of Black youth in most parts of the United States today, especially in the inner city areas of New York, Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other urban centers. It is also spoken in most rural areas and used in the casual, intimate speech of many adults.(Labov 1972, xiii)