African American English is spoken by some, not all, African Americans in the United States, as well as by some non-African Americans who have close contact with African American English-speaking communities. The many speakers who use the variety are on a continuum ranging from those for who use it as their native variety to those who use a limited subset of African American English patterns in limited contexts. The grammatical patterns of African American English are uniform across African American English-speaking communities; however, there may be regional variation across varieties, especially in the sound patterns. African American English, an oral variety, is commonly studied such that descriptions of patterns and constructions associated with it have been described although there are no formal grammars or conventions for representing or writing the variety. The default lect represented in APiCS is based on data from adolescents and adult speakers in an African American English-speaking community in southwestern Louisiana. Some examples were also taken from published works on African American English if they were used by speakers in the Louisiana community.