Expression of the copula in three types of natural language

African American English (AAE) is dismissed as bad English because the speakers sometimes omit the copula from predicative clauses. But this is not random carelessness. AAE exemplifies a widely attested grammatical pattern: the copula is always expressed if emphasized, negated, in the past tense, marking the habitual aspect, or stranded (at the end of a clause, as in "I don't know who he is").

A similar pattern is found in many languages in the Afroasiatic, Indo-European, Niger-Congo, and Uralic families. (These families are not known to be related, so the similarities are typological rather than traceable to common origins.) Standard English shows a different pattern, rather like Turkish, where the present-tense copula is not completely omitted but is radically reduced in pronunciation (in Turkish, to a suffix, and in English, to a single consonant, as in "He's tall"). In a third group of languages the copula is always overtly expressed.

African American English
unexpressed in nonemphatic nonhabitual
(Indo-European)
present affirmative when not stranded

Arabic (Afroasiatic)
unexpressed in nonemphatic present affirmative

Hungarian (Uralic)
unexpressed in third-person present indicative affirmative

Russian (Indo-European)
unexpressed in nonemphatic nonexistential present indicative affirmative

Swahili (Niger-Congo) unexpressed in nonemphatic present affirmative

Standard English
reduced to single consonant in colloquial
(Indo-European)
nonemphatic affirmative present tense

Turkish (Altaic)
reduced to suffix in present tense

French, German, Italian, Spanish (Indo-European), Abkhaz (Northwest Caucasian), Japanese (Japanese-Ryukyuan), etc.

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