I+agree+with+Goldie+on+AAVE

I was talking with an African American woman here at EMU regarding AAVE. She is a teacher and talks in AAVE with her AA friends and talks to me in standard English. That makes her bilingual. Last semester I confided in one of my teachers that I don't understand AAVE. So he recommended a book to me. It was __What Every Teacher Should Know about African American English__. I studied the book carefully and made a report about it. Now I feel more comfortable with AAVE. There are many dialects in Armenian too. Besides the Eastern Armenian (Used by folks still living in the Republic of Armenia) and Western Armenian (Used by folks living in the diaspora), there are many village dialects. When people from Ourfa in historical Armenia speak, other Armenians don't understand them. When people from Diar Bakir speak other people don't understand them. My mother was from Ourfa and dad was from Diar Bakir. I have a mixture of the two dialects although I'm careful to speak the accepted western Armenian with other Armenians. When I came to Beirut from Aleppo I spoke my home dialect, Armenian kids made fun of me, so I did not speak at all for a long time. The other kids' parents and grandparents mixed Turkish in their Armenian conversation and my mother in turn said "At least my kids do not speak turkish, but a dialect of Armenian" and she assured us that it was beautiful and O.K. She was a teacher. Coming back to the AA lady, she said that she would say to her sister: "You late" instead of "You are late" thus omitting the R. That's OK. I understand the meaning. Everyone can understand her. She is economizing on words or making a long story short; besides it is more forceful to say "You late" than "You are late". I know that many AAVE expressions are popular among non-blacks such as "What's UP?" and "Chill, Chillin' ". What exactly are we implying by using these expressions? Aren't we implying that AAVE is cool?