The language spoken nowadays in the United States, American English, is generally recognized as a dialect of English, its standard pronunciation and orthography regularly reproduced in most dictionaries when contrasting with standard British English. The rich cultural legacies and deep cultural dimensions, together with the changing demographics, which underlie language and discourse in the United States, oblige scholars in general and linguists in particular to place their investigations in the context of such diversity. The present article investigates the development of African-American English and the language policies at play in the construction and definition of ethnic identies in the United States