or be's—used in the uninflected form be or sometimes the form bes or be's in African American English and to varying degrees in some other varieties of English to indicate that an action or state is habitual or frequent
I be singing in the shower.
… they be bothering you while you try and do your work. …—unidentified African American English speaker, quoted in The Corpus of Regional African American Language
It bes that way.
We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort. At school, in a given situation, we might respond with "That's not unusual." But in the street, meeting the same situation, we easily said "It be's like that sometimes."—Maya Angelou
Note:
In linguistics, this use is referred to as aspectual be, habitual be, or invariant be. It usually occurs in the uninflected form be, as in the first two examples above; however, in African American English in particular, it sometimes takes the form bes or be's.
: the verb form been used with spoken emphasis in African American English to indicate that something (such as an event or state) happened or existed in the remote past or that it began in the remote past and is still ongoing : stressed bin
While the use of BEEN to mark the remoteness of an action like told (as in She BEEN told me that) stands out as distinct from Mainstream Standard English (MSE), the use of this feature to mark the extended duration of a state like married (as in SheBEENmarried) is camouflaged by its resemblance to more mainstream constructions like She('s) been married, where been is unstressed and lacks the high-pitch … characteristic of remote past BEEN …—Tracey L. Weldon
Note:
The feature of African American English called BEEN frequently precedes perfect (see perfectentry 1 sense 5) verb forms, as well as progressive (see progressiveentry 1 sense 7) verb forms ending in -ing. It can also precede the African American English feature perfective done, additional predicates (such as nouns, adjectives, and prepositional phrases), and, in certain contexts, adverbial phrases.
1 Corinthians 15:20 (Douay Version)
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