Habitual be, also called invariant be, is the use of an uninflectedbe in African-American English (AAE), Caribbean English and Hiberno-English to mark habitual or extended actions in place of the Standard English inflected forms of be, such as is and are. In AAE, use of be indicates that a subject repeatedly does an action or embodies a trait. In General American English, however, the use of (an inflection of) be means only that an individual has done an action in a particular tense, such as in the statement "She was singing" (the habitual is "She sings").
It is a common misconception that AAE simply replaces is with be across all tenses, with no added meaning. In fact, AAE uses be to mark a habitual grammatical aspect, which is not explicitly distinguished in Standard English. For example, to be singing means to sing habitually, not to presently be singing. In one experiment, children were shown drawings of Elmo eating cookies while Cookie Monster looked on. Both Black and White subjects agreed that Elmo is eating cookies, but the Black children said that Cookie Monster be eating cookies.[1][2][3]
Hypothesized sources
The source of habitual be in AAE is still disputed. Some linguists suggest it came from the finite be in the 17th-to-19th century English of British settlers (perhaps especially those from South West England, but the usage may be the recent "Mummerset" in this context). Other linguists believe that it came from Scots-Irish immigrants, whose Ulster Scots dialects mark habitual verb forms with be and do be.
One hypothesis is that habitual be simply diffused into New World Black English from Hiberno-English (HE) through contact in the Caribbean. Evidence includes the fact that both dialects structure sentences with the habitual be almost identically:
(1) Even when I do be round there with friends, I do be scared. (HE)
(2) Christmas Day, well, everybody be so choked up over gifts and everything, they don't be too hungry. (AAE)[4]
Criticism of that hypothesis stems from the fact that there is no evidence that be has been used as a habitual marker either in the past or today in Caribbean creoles of English.[4] Instead, Caribbean English uses the preverbal does to mark habitualness. They use be only as filler between does and the sentence's predicate.
The hypothesis states that the geographical differences in use of be and do (be), in Northern and Southern HE respectively, accounts for the difference in use of be and does (be) in AAE and Caribbean English respectively.[4] In the 17th and the 18th centuries, Northern HE speakers immigrated more to North America, and Southern HE speakers immigrated to the Caribbean Islands, both working alongside black people. Although the expansion to include the differences in the dialects of HE accounts for the absence of habitual be in Caribbean English creoles, the hypothesis has its disadvantages as well. The first problem is the distribution of do and be again. In Southern HE, do is more common with be than other verbs, but in Caribbean English, does is less common with be than other verbs.[4] Hibernian English marks habitualness with be, and Caribbean English rarely marks it, if at all. A second problem is that there is not sufficient evidence to show that Southern HE speakers did not introduce do (be) to the American colonies since there were Southern HE speakers in the colonies who worked closely with Black people.
A further expansion and modification of the diffusion hypotheses account for the periphrastic do found in Caribbean English creoles. The feature was common in British English and persisted in the nonstandard Southern and Southwestern English dialects that were used by the White colonials in the Caribbean colonies.[4] Irish and Black people both learned English at the same time, and both groups learned a new language and retained the conventions of their native languages. In America, the Irish feature habitual be may have diffused into AAE and the two assemblages of people were in close contact and communicating with a new tongue. It is possible that British dialects could have had features that served as models for habitual do (be) in the Caribbean creoles, which, in turn, expanded to AAE in the Americas. It is also worth noting that Southern and Southwestern British immigrants traveled to the American colonies as well and their dialects would have been used as a model to Black people, leading to a drawback, the introduction, and subsequent loss of habitual do (be) in America, which was also the problem with the first expansion of the diffusion hypothesis.[4] Another hypothesis for the origins of habitual be in HE and then into AAE is the most logical and the strongest of the lot.
The decreolization theory for the emergence of habitual be in AAE is the most likely and most supported of the theories of its origin. It involves the decreolization process of Caribbean English creole, with the loss of does (be), which itself is a decreolization of a previous creole habitual marker and its co-occurrence with be.[4] The process is seen as one code-shifting in the series of English learned by black people in the New World. The existence of a category of habituals in the native Caribbean languages at the basilectal level shows that over time, Black people learned English but kept the conventions of their native languages until code-shifting replaced the old conventions with new ones. Rickford gives evidence:
(18) Habitual aspect with a prepositional phrase or locative:
Stage 1: He (d)a de [dc] in the bed. (basilect)
Stage 2: He does de in the bed. (hab. (d)a -> does)
Stage 3: He does be in the bed. (loc. cop. de -> be)
Stage 4: He 0 be in the bed. (does -> 0; be 'habitual')
That set is just one of three; preceding a predicate containing a prepositional phrase, it shows the shifting from the basilectal, native language convention, level to the English habitual be level in stage 4, with the co-existence of two or more stages at once.[4] It is hypothesized that the first three stages were present in the speech of plantation slaves, and the hypothesis appears to be supported by the presence of these stages today on the Sea Islands of the United States, with only stage four surviving anywhere else in America.[4] The advantages of this hypothesis are that there is no assumption that black people had no native language influence and that the conventions of English were perfectly copied to their emerging English grammars and the fact that the decreolizing of habitual be also follows the pattern of decreolization in general linguistics and the pattern in cultural anthropology, with formal approximations of English over time and cultural assimilation of language respectively.[4]
Another merit is that this same pattern of decreolizing of be is found in other creoles that are relatively close to AAE and affirm the plausibility of this origin for habitual be. Yet another merit for the hypothesis is that it can both incorporate the strong points of the revised diffusion hypotheses and surmount the weaknesses associated with them. For instance, creoles and dialects have lexicons that derive from the languages that feed them, and AAE and Caribbean English are no different by following the models of language dialects that came in contact with them and used their native language conventions as well as the newly learned conventions to mutate into varieties of the model language.
A possible disadvantage of the hypothesis is that it does not work for area in which creoles did not develop, such as areas of America with very few black people in the population.[4] Another possible disadvantage is that the sources of slaves for the differing regions of America and the Caribbean could have led to different creole starting points, leading to the different habitual markers in AAE and Caribbean English creoles. Both minor problems are far outweighed by the advantages of the hypothesis, and they affirm that it is the best possible origin of habitual be.
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form, and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period of time. While the concept is similar to that of a mixed or hybrid language, creoles are often characterized by a tendency to systematize their inherited grammar. Like any language, creoles are characterized by a consistent system of grammar, possess large stable vocabularies, and are acquired by children as their native language. These three features distinguish a creole language from a pidgin. Creolistics, or creology, is the study of creole languages and, as such, is a subfield of linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a creolist.
Ebonics is a term that was originally intended to refer to the language of all people descended from African slaves, particularly in West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. The term Ebonics was created in 1973 by a group of black scholars who disapproved of the negative terms being used to describe this type of language. Since the 1996 controversy over its use by the Oakland School Board, the term Ebonics has primarily been used to refer to the sociolect African-American English, a dialect distinctively different from Standard American English.
African-American English is the set of English sociolects spoken by most Black people in the United States and many in Canada; most commonly, it refers to a dialect continuum ranging from African-American Vernacular English to a more standard American English. Like all widely spoken language varieties, African-American English shows variation stylistically, generationally, geographically, in rural versus urban characteristics, in vernacular versus standard registers, etc. There has been a significant body of African-American literature and oral tradition for centuries.
Patois is speech or language that is considered nonstandard, although the term is not formally defined in linguistics. As such, patois can refer to pidgins, creoles, dialects or vernaculars, but not commonly to jargon or slang, which are vocabulary-based forms of cant.
Gullah is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people, an African-American population living in coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia as well as extreme northeastern Florida and the extreme southeast of North Carolina.
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians. Having its own unique grammatical, vocabulary, and accent features, AAVE is employed by middle-class Black Americans as the more informal and casual end of a sociolinguistic continuum. However, in formal speaking contexts, speakers tend to switch to more standard English grammar and vocabulary, usually while retaining elements of the nonstandard accent. Despite being widespread throughout the United States, AAVE is not the native dialect of all African Americans, and not all speakers are African American.
Portuguese creoles are creole languages which have Portuguese as their substantial lexifier. The most widely-spoken creoles influenced by Portuguese are Cape Verdean Creole, Guinea-Bissau Creole and Papiamento.
Bajan, or Bajan Creole, is an English-based creole language with African and British influences spoken on the Caribbean island of Barbados. Bajan is primarily a spoken language, meaning that in general, standard English is used in print, in the media, in the judicial system, in government, and in day-to-day business, while Bajan is reserved for less formal situations, in music, or in social commentary. Ethnologue reports that, as of 2018, 30,000 Barbadians were native English speakers, while 260,000 natively spoke Bajan.
Jamaican Patois is an English-based creole language with West African, Taíno, Irish, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Chinese, and German influences, spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican diaspora. Words or slang from Jamaican Patois can be heard in other Caribbean countries, the United Kingdom and Toronto, Canada. The majority of non-English words in Patois derive from the West African Akan language. It is spoken by the majority of Jamaicans as a native language.
Trinidadian and Tobagonian English (TE) or Trinidadian and Tobagonian Standard English is a dialect of English used in Trinidad and Tobago. TE co-exists with both non-standard varieties of English as well as other dialects, namely Trinidadian Creole in Trinidad and Tobagonian Creole in Tobago.
Virgin Islands Creole, or Virgin Islands Creole English, is an English-based creole consisting of several varieties spoken in the Virgin Islands and the nearby SSS islands of Saba, Saint Martin and Sint Eustatius, where it is known as Saban English, Saint Martin English, and Statian English, respectively.
Guyanese English Creole is an English-based creole language spoken by the Guyanese people. Linguistically, it is similar to other English dialects of the Caribbean region, based on 19th-century English and has loan words from West African, Indian-South Asian, Arawakan, and older Dutch languages.
Belizean Creole is an English-based creole language spoken by the Belizean Creole people. It is closely related to Miskito Coastal Creole, San Andrés-Providencia Creole, and Jamaican Patois.
John Russell Rickford is a Guyanese–American academic and author. Rickford is the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University's Department of Linguistics and the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where he has taught since 1980. His book Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, which he wrote together with his son, Russell J. Rickford, won the American Book Award in 2000.
A post-creole continuum is a dialect continuum of varieties of a creole language between those most and least similar to the superstrate language. Due to social, political, and economic factors, a creole language can decreolize towards one of the languages from which it is descended, aligning its morphology, phonology, and syntax to the local standard of the dominant language but to different degrees depending on a speaker's status.
Atlantic Creole is a cultural identifier of those with origins in the transatlantic settlement of the Americas via Europe and Africa.
The languages of the Caribbean reflect the region's diverse history and culture. There are six official languages spoken in the Caribbean:
Dialect levelling or leveling is the process of an overall reduction in the variation or diversity of features between two or more dialects. Typically, this comes about through assimilation, mixture, and merging of certain dialects, often by language standardization. It has been observed in most languages with large numbers of speakers after industrialisation and modernisation of the areas in which they are spoken.
The habitual aspect is a form of expression connoting repetition or continuous existence of a state of affairs. In standard English, for present reference there is no special grammatical marker of habitual aspect; the simple present is used, as in I go there. However, for past reference English uses the simple past form or either of two marked constructions: used to as in we used to go there , and would as in back then we would go there .
References
↑ Jackson, Janice Eurana (1998). Linguistic aspect in African-American English-speaking children: An investigation of aspectual "be". Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Amherst. ISBN9780591960327. ProQuest304446674.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000 "Be"
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000 "Zero Copula"
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