Many languages exhibit this in some contexts, including Assamese, Bengali, Kannada, Malay/Indonesian, Filipino/Tagalog, Turkish, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi, Guarani, Kazakh, Turkmen, Chinese, Japanese, Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Tatar, Azerbaijani, Swahili, Hungarian, Hebrew, Arabic, Berber,[1] Ganda, Hawaiian, Sinhala, Irish, Welsh, Nahuatl, Māori, Mongolian, Greenlandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish[citation needed], Slovak, Quechua, and American Sign Language.
Dropping the copula is also found, to a lesser extent, in English and many other languages, used most frequently in rhetoric, casual speech, non-standard varieties, and headlinese, the writing style used in newspaper headlines.
However, no known natural language lacks this structure, and it is not clear how a comparative is joined with its correlate in this kind of copula.
It can also be found, in a slightly different and more regular form, in the headlines of English newspapers, where short words and articles are generally omitted to conserve space.
The zero copula is far more common in some varieties of Caribbean creoles and African American Vernacular English,[3] where phrases like "Where you at?"
In Russian the copula быть (byt’) is normally omitted in the present tense, but not in the past and future tenses: Present (omitted): Past (used): The third person plural суть (sut’, "are") is still used in some standard phrases, but since it is a homonym of the noun "essence", most native speakers do not notice it to be a verb: The verb быть (byt’) is the infinitive of "to be".
A present tense (есть, yest’) exists; however, it is almost never used as a copula, but rather omitted altogether or replaced by the verb являться (yavlyat'sa, "to be in essence").
The present tense of the copula in Russian was in common use well into the 19th century (as attested in the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky) but is now used only for archaic effect (analogous to "thou art" in English).
For example: The essential copula is possible in the third person singular:[citation needed] In Tatar, dir expresses doubt rather than a characteristic.
It is sometimes omitted with predicative nouns and adjectival nouns in non-past tense, such as keitai-denwa wa benri (携帯電話は便利[だ]（です）, mobile phones [are] convenient), but is necessary for marking past tense or negation, as in ii keiken datta(ii keiken deshita) (いい経験だった（いい経験でした）, [it] was [a] good experience).
For example: The extra pronoun is highly recommended in order for one not to confuse the predicate for a qualifying adjective: (This is just a noun phrase with no copula.
If included, it would make the adjective qualify the noun omuwala attributively: American Sign Language does not have a copula.
Many indigenous languages of South America do, however, have true zero copulae in which no overt free or bound morpheme is present when one noun is equated with another.
In fact, zero-copula is likely to occur in third-person contexts in Southern Quechua (notice wasiqa hatunmi 'the house is big' vs. wasiqa hatunmi kan 'the house is big', where kan, the Quechua copula, is not really needed, as suggested by the first sentence).
Yaghan, from Tierra del Fuego, used, in its heyday back in the mid-19th century, zero copula as one option, when introducing new participants in discourse, but had a slew of posture-based copular verbs for all other contexts.
kvnji 'this', u:a 'man' (v here is schwa, and colon marks tenseness of the vowel preceding it), but once John has been introduced I might say, Jon lvpatvx-wvshta:gu:a mu:ta 'John is a woodworker', lvpatvx 'wood' (x voiceless velar fricative), wvshta:gu: 'work' u:a 'man', mu:ta irregular present tense form of mu:tu: 'to be (sitting) (or occupied doing)' Modern Standard Chinese, as well as many other Chinese dialects, uses a copula, such as the Mandarin word shì (是), before nouns in predications, like in Wŏ shì Zhōngguó rén (我是中国人 / I am Chinese), but not usually before verbs or adjectives.