Most people don’t adopt a new manner of speech in their 40’s, so when my husband recently started using the phrase “y’all” I wondered what was up. It wasn’t like his Swiss parents taught him to use this slang, and he’d grown up in Colorado, where y’all is uttered only by Texas transplants.
After hearing him say y’all for something like the tenth time in a week, I asked him why he’d suddenly adopted this word, which seemed out of place spoken by someone without a southern accent. He explained that he’d started using y’all with the college ski team that he coaches. Most of the skiers are women, and he thought it would be lame to refer to them as “you guys” — the phrase more widely used here in Colorado. “English really needs a plural you,” he says.
He has a point. All of the languages I’ve studied — German, Italian and Spanish — have a plural you, and while that extra pronoun was frustrating to me as a language student, I’ve encountered plenty of times when I’ve wished for a plural you in English that wasn’t gendered or regional.
According to Mental Floss, “y’all” is just one of eight ways to construct the plural “you” in English. Others include “you-uns,” “you guys,” “you lot,” and “yous.” None of the terms on this list roll off my tongue any easier than the others.
Most of the times when I long for a plural you, it’s because I’m greeting a group of friends. My fallbacks are usually “hey guys” or “hello everyone,” but neither feels as satisfying or apt as the Swiss German phrase, “Grüezi Mitenand!” (Hello everyone!)
Why? Mostly, I’m reluctant to adopt a dialect that doesn’t feel like mine. But I long ago decided that “howdy” was a perfectly apt greeting for a stranger encountered in the wilds of the West, so perhaps it’s time I follow Dave’s lead and take up y’all too. So what if I’ve always associated the word with rednecks and cowboys? If y’all is a redneck term, it’s a gender neutral, feminist one. Just ask Tami Taylor.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/vihYkEAQ_DY
*Image by mlhradio, via Flickr
This post first ran on December 12, 2013, but it’s just as relevant today as it was then.
Growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs, “yous” (pronounced “yooze”) was the plural of choice. It’s very much a Philly thing, like calling a submarine sandwich a “hoagie” or pronouncing the word for H2O as “wooder.” I always thought “yous” made sense; adding an S to the end of the word is consistent with other English plurals. Alas, I moved to the South for college and stayed, and now I use y’all and it works just as well.
Also needed now is “they all” to disambiguate plural “they” when necessary. And while we’re at it, how about “we all” for inclusive “we” (i.e., you and the rest of us, as opposed to the rest of us but not you)?
Oh Robert, you’re complicating things. Simple and unclear, that’s how we like it.
Irish has the singular “tú” and the plural “sibh”, and that has carried over to Hiberno-English, where the plural “ye” is still in fairly common usage. English does indeed need a plural “you”, as evidenced by the proliferation of plurals in various dialects—as Southerners, my wife and I habitually use “y’all”, but we’ve been known to mix it up with a “you lot”, and we’ve both encountered “yinz” in the wild. How Standard English has remained so resistant is a bit of a mystery (“you lot” is British English, but not Standard Received English).
Two caveats with regard to “y’all”: Firstly, spelling counts. “Y’all” is a perfectly valid word; “ya’ll” an abomination. Secondly, it’s a mandatory plural; nothing will mark one as an outsider (and a pretentious, possibly condescending outsider at that) like addressing an individual as “y’all”. I’ve encountered a claim that “y’all” can be used as an honorific or formal “you”, much like the French “vous”, but only amongst Yankees. Possibly they have been confused by the emphatic usage “all o’ y’all”, or by the friendly “How y’all doing?”, which when addressed to an individual translates as akin to “How’s your mama and them?”: an inquiry into the well-being of the individual and his or her family.
The point being: “Y’all” may not be Standard English, but its usage is still governed by linguistic rules. As is “ain’t”.