Entry · catalog no. 3306
been knew
/ bɪn nu /BIN noo
phrase · national · 20th c.
✓ Verified
1.
To have known something for a long time, and to know it still. The stressed 'been' (linguists write it BIN) marks the remote past — 'we been knew' means we have known this for ages, not that we knew it once. A grammatical feature of Black English, not an error.
“You just now finding out? We been knew.”
Origin & Attribution
A grammatical feature of African American Vernacular English — the stressed remote-past "BIN" — documented by sociolinguists since the early 1970s, notably in John Rickford's work on Black English. Routinely mislabeled online as a typo or "bad grammar," it is in fact a rule-governed tense-aspect marker with no single-word equivalent in mainstream English.
1970s
Stressed 'BIN' documented in AAVE grammar
1970s
Analyzed in linguistic scholarship
2010s
Mislabeled online as slang or error
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
national · 20th c.
Spoken by
Black English speakers
$BEENKNThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Rising56 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
58/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1970
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
John R. Rickford, scholarship on Black English stressed BIN — academic
1973
■
+ Cite a source"Unstressed been," American Speech, Duke University Press — journal
2017
See also