Habitual be

Habitual be, also called invariant be, is the use of an uninflected be 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. This is referred to as the habitual aspect of the verb "to be". 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, five- and six-year-old children were shown drawings of Elmo eating cookies while Cookie Monster (a character in the popular United States children's television show Sesame Street who habitually eats cookies) looked on. Thirty-five of the children were AAE-speaking and 18 were Standard English speaking. Both AAE-speaking and Standard English speaking subjects agreed that Elmo is eating cookies, but the AAE-speaking children said that Cookie Monster be eating cookies.