**** Recreolization, critiques of decreolization

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Guy Bailey and Natalie Maynor discuss the issue of decreolization in North American Black English vernacular, concluding that it is based on assumptions about the direction of language change which do not hold up to empirical study. They find several syntactic structures, such durative BE, that are moving away from standard English through time, having no correlate in the standard variety. Such features could not be derived from the standard. They attribute these amomolous constructions to the great rural-to-urban migrations of millions of African Americans during the past seventy-five years which have resulted in black urban communities largely separate from interaction with whites. They attribute the changes to reanalysis in the face of massive geographic dislocation. Although Bailkey and Maynor never call it "recreolization," their study focuses on a generation of children whose language diverges significantly from that of the hypothetically more creolized earlier generations.