It is natural to superimpose one's known grammatical structure upon a language that one is attempting to learn, as in the German placement of the direct object after any interrupting phrase; it was comically noted at the turn of the century that the recent German immigrants would readily construct the following type of English sentence: Throw Mama from the stairs her hat. In the same way, the slaves, many of whom were from West Africa, superimposed their own grammatical structure upon their new master's language, ending up with what linguists define today as "Black English." Broadly explained, Black English has its own grammatical structure — even though it is non-Standard English. It is not solely "bad grammar," for in some cases, the "errors" are intentional for effect.
The most prominent example of this dialect is in the "abuse" of the verb "to be." Blacks have always "abused" the grammatical form of the verb "to be" in whatever language slaves were forced to learn — be it English, French, Spanish, or Dutch. These "abuses" are even found in Surinam, which proves the result of the African continuum, for many West African languages have a habitual tense which translates as "to be." Note the following examples of this habitual tense:
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Harry be waiting for me every night when I come home.
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You can never reach Mary because she be talking on the phone.
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Donald be so tired when he leaves work.
In each of the above examples, the word "be" means "all of the time." However, in the following examples, forms of the verb "to be" are purposely omitted in order to express a different meaning:
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The answer to the question: "What is Harry doing right now?" might be, "He waiting."
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The answer to the question: "What is Mary doing right now?" might be, "She talking on the phone."
Note that in the above examples, there are distinctly different meanings. When the word "be" is used in the above constructions, the meaning is "all the time." Omitting the main verb before the participle means the action is taking place "right now." So, in the black dialect, "He talking" means something completely different from "He be talking."
