Corpora: corpus of AAVE

[Kristen Precht]

Colleagues --

I am looking for a corpus of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), or
barring that, texts that would be appropriate to compile into a corpus of
spoken language.  I have looked in all the usual places on the web that list
corpora, and been unable to find anything.  Can this be?  Does anyone know
of a good source or of anyone currently working on a corpus?

If there is indeed a lack of corpora for AAVE -- I'm not entirely sure this
is the case --  this might be the kind of issue that would be worth
discussing on the list.  It would seem, with the recent interest in
structure and analysis of AAVE that this is an area that is ripe for corpus
work.  I'm a former student (if we ever really become "former" students) of
Doug Biber, and am interested in a multi-dimensional analysis of AAVE
structure and stance.

Another question -- I have heard AAVE recently called "Urban English" -- has
anyone else heard this new name?  I know this question is a bit off the
beaten track for Corpus, but thought I'd ask.

I will post any answers to my question to the list.

Kristen Precht
Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics
Department of English
Kent State University
kprecht at kent.edu <mailto:kprecht at kent.edu>