Firstly an afford will be made to find a sufficient definition for AAVE. There are lots of different labels for the variety that changed as time passed and various researchers had various perspectives on AAVE. As a treatment of the origins and history of the vernacular would go beyond the scope of this seminar paper, the phonological and morphosyntactic features of AAVE will be looked at in the following chapters, whereas Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" will be used as data basis. The book was published in 1982 and is the best-known black novel written entirely in AAVE (cf. Rickford and Rickford 2000: 160), so that examples for the particular distinctive features could be found in it. In the last part of this paper the functions of the usage of AAVE in literature will be examined, again focusing on Walker's novel. The main questions of this seminar paper will thus be: which linguistic features characterise AAVE, how are they used and why, respectively to what purpose are they used, especially in the epistolary novel "The Color Purple."