The study of the relationship between language and a dialect of language, divorced from social factors of language variation, fails to accommodate the nature of language involved and authentic boundaries between linguistic varieties. As evidence of such an example, African American Vernacular English (AAVE) reveals the characteristics of a creole kin, not a nonstandard dialect of Standard English, which in turn implies that boundaries between language varieties are drawn not on the basis of the similar distribution of linguistic items alone. In view of AAVE, it is descriptively inadequate to attempt to prescriptively describe a variety of language in terms of some deviations from the rules of homogeneous invariant systems which are described within the traditional categorical view.