"Dey A Lie"

I was making supper. While standing in the kitchen I mused about how the only freight forwarder who had responded to my shipping order says his American partner told him they do not handle "household goods" and "personal effects." I spent an awful lot of time in trucking to finance my work, education and research. 'Dey a lie...' immediately came to mind because even according to the overlapping national and international laws and treaties that govern shipping, household goods are not treated any more or less the value than the owner declared. In short, it ain't that deep. A rebuke of the energy trying to hinder me from packing up this apartment. Now like most Black folks and all educated ones, I speak colloquial English typically. But "code switch" back into the more comfortable Black English when among close acquaintances or perhaps family. I cannot ever recall using that exact phrase - ever. But I clearly recognized it having a Creole root. Why did it pop into my conscious so unexpectedly? What was the significance? More importantly, what was its origin? Anxious to see what linguists have discovered, I simply asked the question. The results were astounding. 

Tracing the Origin of "Dey A Lie"

The construction "dey a lie" (meaning "they are lying" or "they are telling lies") is a fascinating example of how grammatical structures from earlier Creole languages have persisted and influenced specific forms of Black English.

1. The Components and their Function

The linguistic significance lies in the three main elements, particularly the particle a:

Component

Example

Function

Origin Trajectory

Dey

Dey a lie

The third-person plural subject pronoun ("they"). In Creoles, pronouns are often uninflected (do not change form regardless of their position in the sentence).

Shared feature of English Creoles and earlier Black English.

A

Dey a lie

The Progressive or Continuous Aspect Marker. This is the key element. It marks that the action is ongoing or habitual.

Direct inheritance from Atlantic Creoles, ultimately stemming from West African languages.

Lie

Dey a lie

The verb or predicate (the action).

English vocabulary base.

2. The Role of the "A" Marker

The presence of the pre-verbal particle a (sometimes transcribed as da or duh in older texts) is what distinguishes this phrase from general AAVE.

In standard AAVE (African American Vernacular English): The progressive is typically marked by either the zero copula (They lying) or the habitual aspect (They be lying). The particle a is rare or non-existent in modern urban AAVE.

In Gullah/Geechee: This is where the feature is most clearly retained in the US. In Gullah, the particle da or a is the standard progressive marker used before the main verb. For example, a Gullah speaker might say, "Shum da fish" (They are fishing) or "Deh a run" (They are running).

In Caribbean Creoles (e.g., Jamaican Patois): The particle a is a robust and widely used marker for the progressive aspect. This structure is known as the Atlantic Creole Tense-Aspect System, which replaces the inflected English verb forms (like the '-ing' ending and the 'to be' auxiliary) with invariant pre-verbal particles.

3. Tracing the Deep Roots (West African Substrate)

Linguists widely agree that the grammatical template for this construction originates in the West African Substrate languages (the languages spoken by enslaved people who formed the first Creoles in the Americas, such as Niger-Congo languages).

In many West African languages, the practice of using small, invariant particles positioned immediately before the main verb to indicate tense, mood, or aspect is common. When these speakers learned English vocabulary, they applied their native grammatical rules to the new words, leading to the creation of the English-lexified Atlantic Creoles (like Gullah, which influenced early Southern Black English).

Therefore, "dey a lie" traces its structural origin back to the linguistic mixing that occurred during the colonial era, where African grammatical patterns were applied to an English vocabulary.