It's not ludicrous, and you're being ignorant. Additionally, using words like "legitimate" and "devolved" illustrate perfectly the concept of high-prestige versus low-prestige language dialects.
People don't speak AAVE because they're lazy or dumb. They speak AAVE because they grew up where everyone else speaks AAVE.
If the South had won the Civil War you might not think using double negatives, double modals, etc. were a sign of stupidity -- AAVE and Southern (white) English share many common syntactic and morphological features.
People don't speak AAVE because they're lazy or dumb. They speak AAVE because they grew up where everyone else speaks AAVE.
If the South had won the Civil War you might not think using double negatives, double modals, etc. were a sign of stupidity -- AAVE and Southern (white) English share many common syntactic and morphological features.