Scholars of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have generally assumed that the invariant am typical of minstrel depictions of Black speech was a fabrication, used neither by modern nor earlier Black Americans. However, the frequency with which invariant am occurs in renditions of interviews with ex-slave speech has always lent a certain uncertainty here, despite claims that these must have been distortions introduced by the interviewers. The author argues that the use of invariant am in a great many literary sources written by Black writers with sober intention, grammatical descriptions of Black speech that note invariant am as a feature, and the use of invariant am in regional British dialects imported to the New World suggest that invariant am was present in earlier AAVE and common among Black slaves and their immediate descendants, yet had largely disappeared by World War II.

中文翻译：

---

重温早期非裔美国人白话英语中的不变式

非裔美国人白话英语 (AAVE) 的学者普遍认为，吟游诗人对黑人演讲的描述中的典型不变是一种捏造，现代和早期的美国黑人都没有使用过。然而，不变量 am 出现在用前奴隶讲话的采访中的频率总是在这里带来一定的不确定性，尽管声称这些一定是采访者引入的扭曲。作者认为，在大量由黑人作家以清醒的意图撰写的文学资料中使用不变量 am，将不变量 am 作为一个特征的黑人演讲的语法描述，以及在导入到新版的英国地方方言中使用不变量 am世界表明不变的 am 存在于早期的 AAVE 中，并且在黑人奴隶及其直系后代中很常见，