Sure, and many rules of AAVE are more consistent.

For instance take the following words in standard English:

    * yourself
    * myself
    * ourselves
    * himself
    * itself

One of these things is not like the other! All of these take the form of possive + "self," except "himself." And sure enough, in AAVE we have "hisself" instead. A more logical, consistent replacement.

So when some people think of AAVE speakers as incorrect, it is because they don't use the right wrong way to talk. Linguistics is a weird field.

You omitted 2 of the reflexive pronouns. Only the 1st and 2nd person forms use the possessive:

  * myself, ourselves, yourself.

All of the 3rd person forms use the personal pronoun:

  * themselves, himself, herself, itself

Does AAVE also use "theirselves" ?

This article http://acrwebsite.org/volumes/7610/volumes/v21/NA-21 claims that AAVE uses "theirselves".

A quick search on Twitter suggests that "theirselves" is indeed used by people who use "hisself", but perhaps half an order of magnitude less than "themselves".

To more heavily emphasize the point here consider the feminine possive as well, her/hers:

    * herself

"her" is both the possessive and the accusative, so it's consistent with either myself or himself. Itself too, since you can consider it a contraction of either "it-self" or "its-self".

I recall that immigrant populations that don't integrate into the main population for long periods of time have a tendency to learn simplified versions of the original language. If I recall correctly, Old English lost a lot of its ornament when the Norse settled in Britain.

EDIT: I'm puzzled by the downvotes. Am I mistaken? If so, I'm happy to be corrected.

You are probably thinking of Pidgins and Creoles[0], two very well studied linguistic categories that come about when two or more groups with no shared language come together (Pidgin) and then their children learn the Pidgin as a first language (morphing it into a Creole). AAVE is grammatically and functionally distinct from either a Pidgin or a Creole.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language

Right. The point is that the differences are following rules, they're not "mistakes".

Seems like arguing semantics--what is a "mistake" if not a departure from the established convention? What is the difference between a "rule" and a "mistake"? That the "mistake" is repeated a certain amount of times and/or by some critical mass of people? How often / how many people must repeat the mistake before it becomes a rule? If it becomes a new rule, does it cease to become a mistake? The classification quickly begins to feel arbitrary.

> What is the difference between a "rule" and a "mistake"?

Your question is answered directly in Pullum's article, at length. He even gives a separate explicit example of the who-whom distinction and explains how it works and how to think about it. There is a clear reason for why this is not arbitrary.

A mistake is made from ignorance or carelessness. It is individual and won't be shared, at least not widely. A rule is applied intentionally and consistently, and it can get wide support. Importantly, making up new rules does not indicate a mental or moral deficiency like making lots of mistakes might.

Yeh which makes sense because grammatical rules are by the nature of how a people would develop a language intuitive to humans. We put names to those grammatical rules, but they are typically more so a function of how human beings as a species communicate.

If you want to read more about dialects, I know Victor Mair (from Language Log) wrote a lot about such things in the context of Chinese (e.g., http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10303; http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=124). That's not anything specifically to do with AAVE, but more the general concept of what does and doesn't let you call something a dialect.