Bryan Lufkin writes for the BBC about the surprising (to me) spread of a familiar word:
What do y’all think of when you hear the term ‘y’all’?
Perhaps the twangy accent of the Southern United States? You wouldn’t be wrong – the term, a contraction of ‘you all’, is a ubiquitous part of Southern speech that extends across demographic lines. For many people, it has a certain down-home, hospitable friendliness that sounds specific to the South
In other regions of the US, ‘y’all’ has historically been far less common. Yet, in the past couple years, ‘y’all’ seems to have exploded in use, including and especially among people who live far outside the South, in places north of the Mason-Dixon Line in the US, like New York City, and even overseas.
Australian Twitter users, many of whom have started saying ‘y’all’, are being playfully chided for trying to masquerade as Americans. Forty-something CEOs in the US have traded ‘you guys’ for ‘y’all’ under the influence of their more progressive Gen Z colleagues. And LGBTQ+ advocacy groups encourage the ‘y’all means all’ mantra, arguing that the term is preferred because it includes people of all gender identities.
‘Y’all’ is fun and useful – but the way the term has gradually slipped into conversation in other English-speaking regions and countries tells us a lot about how and why certain bits of language catch on. The more widespread use of y’all also signals a shift towards more careful use of language to be more inclusive, including within the workplace. […]
Bonikowski finds it interesting this evolution appears to be from the ground up. A top-down change in linguistics might be when a respected style guide announces a change: for example, recommending news organisations use ‘police officer’ instead of ‘policeman’. But ‘y’all’s’ ascent seems to be the reverse, starting from the speakers themselves and gaining traction on social media. “This grassroots acceptance of this is filtered into general public awareness,” says Bonikowski.
Much more at the link; thanks, Trevor!
Australian Twitter users, many of whom have started saying ‘y’all’, …
Australians use the perfectly cromulent “yous(e)”. I don’t Twit, but I haven’t noted any suppletion of youse in other online contexts. (I haven’t visited Aus in several years, so can’t comment on face-to-face usage.)
What do y’all think of when you hear the term ‘y’all’? Perhaps the twangy accent of the Southern United States?
Which I associate directly with racism. I worked with a team of (white) Americans from Peoria (not Southern, I know), who used ‘y’all’ all the time — but only when there were all whites in the room.
For God’s sake. From the article:
You associate it with racism because you associate the South with racism, which is bigotry in itself. I realize anti-Southern bigotry, like ageism, is one of the last acceptable forms of bigotry, but let’s try and do better. The South has no monopoly on racism, which is ubiquitous in the US.
languagehat: I know there was plenty of racist slavery in the north of the USA (Jefferson and Washinton themselves), but there was reasons a lot of the nineteenth century’s constitutions had explicit articles against slavery, beginning with the Belgian one?
There was even slavery in Bulgaria of Nubians, before the 1878 constitution (quite rare). There was also slavery of Bulgarians in other parts of the Ottoman Empire (very common).
Counterpoint: already back in 2004 I met people who were using you guys (stressed on the first syllable) completely regardless of gender(s) or social status of the addressees, and none of the addressees ever twitched while I was watching.
languagehat: I know there was plenty of racist slavery in the north of the USA (Jefferson and Washinton themselves), but there was reasons a lot of the nineteenth century’s constitutions had explicit articles against slavery, beginning with the Belgian one?
Not sure what your point is. What does the Belgian constitution have to do with anything? I’m not talking about constitutions or slavery, I’m talking about plain old racism, the belief that blacks and other people of color are worth less than “white” people and can be relegated to the worst jobs, neighborhoods, schools, etc. This is ubiquitous in the US, even if it’s associated with the South because there it was bound up with slavery and the Civil War. The KKK, for example, was founded in the South but didn’t last long; decades later, it was revived in the north:
The open racism of whites in Boston, to take one example, is notorious. But no place in the US is immune. Some just have better publicity.
It’s deeply interesting if the rules of usage are such that y’all is used only with the perceived peer group of the speaker, be that racially defined or otherwise. It’s threading the borderline between pragmatics and morphology. What should we call it? The affilial 3pp? It also makes me wonder if any other societies have developed grammatical distinctions based on caste. I’d expect different requirements for politeness, but incorporated in grammar, that’s something else.
That’s certainly not true of the South, where “y’all” is ubiquitous among all groups. I don’t know what shadings of usage it’s developing in other areas.
languagehat: “The open racism of whites in Boston, to take one example, is notorious. But no place in the US is immune. Some just have better publicity.”
Especially in places like Brookline, the prototypical suburb.
“Y’all” previously on LH: 2004 (toby: “I love the spelling rendition for all y’ll but know of it more in an Ebonics content”), 2005 (Christopher Sundita: “I’ve never lived in the south, but I use y’all all the time”), 2007 (Krishna Kumar: “You might be a bit surprised to know that “y’all” is very commonly used in Mumbai”), 2018 (“Meanwhile, just as y’all seems to be spreading outside the South, you-guys is moving into the South, especially among younger speakers”). Clearly I shouldn’t have been surprised on reading about its spread in 2022.
The South has no monopoly on racism, which is ubiquitous in the US.
Sure, I’ll readily condemn large swathes of the U.S.A. I’m bigoted against racism anywhere. Your point is what?
Hence my data point from Illinois. These were very much not the hipsters from the U.S. seaboards, who form most of my impressions of contemporary Americans. I hear the late night TV hosts and their guests using ‘y’all’ only in scare-quotes/caricaturing Southern speech.
The Peorians weren’t adopting Southern twang. But presumably they were aware this is an AAVE usage, which is why they dropped the phrase in the presence of non-whites. (Not that we have many actual Blacks in NZ).
Among, yes. I played with the idea that it’s used within all groups but not across perceived group boundaries. I don’t know if that’s the case, but if it is, or if usage is developing in that direction, it surely would be significant.
But if the “by whites among whites alone” rule is exclusively Northern, there could be all sorts of reasons for that. A strong impediment against open imitation of AAVE features, fear of being accused of mockery or cultural appropriation, or of being interpreted as racist, none of which are racist in their motivation, even if all are based in the awkwardness of a society struggling to come to terms with its culturally encoded racism.
The correct form for the second person plural is una. Or yufala, of course. Either is acceptable.
I hear the late night TV hosts and their guests using ‘y’all’ only in scare-quotes/caricaturing Southern speech.
If late night TV and a group of Peorians is your database, you really shouldn’t be making pronouncements about usage. And being against racism is a cheap thrill, condemning large swathes of the U.S.A. an even cheaper one. Attacking the Other is so much more enjoyable than examining one’s own failings and those of one’s own people. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.”
@languagehat : the 1878 (technically 1879) Bulgarian constitution borrowed quite a lot from the Belgian 1831 one.
Maybe things are or were otherwise in Peoria, but where I grew up right by the Mason-Dixon Line I think “y’all” was definitely perceived as a white Southernism even though we must have at some level been aware that it was to some extent also an AAVE-ism. But if you heard a white kid who did not have it as part of his idiolect saying it and you thought it might be an affectation you would have thought it was a white-Southern affectation (this was the Dukes of Hazzard era, when white southerners were perceived as having put Jim Crow behind them and were thus temporarily cool) not an AAVE-ism.
I can think of instances of white kids I grew up with adopting lexemes/phrases we associated with (and had picked up from) the black kids we went to school with, but “y’all” didn’t fall into that category. Similarly, if for some reason (perhaps not a very edifying one …) a white kid wanted to emulate stereotypical black speech, I don’t think “y’all” would be in the first eight or ten stereotypical indicators (whether word choice, pronunciation, or syntax) that would have been employed to convey that. For obvious reasons, attempting sounds-like-stereotypical-black-speech in front of black kids would generally have been avoided, but specific slang borrowings like I was thinking of in the first sentence of this paragraph not.
I can’t stand “y’all”. Can’t explain why though. The sound? The spelling? The kind of people who use it that I saw on twitter? The fact that many people say I’m supposed to use it? The Americanness?
No idea.
where I grew up right by the Mason-Dixon Line I think “y’all” was definitely perceived as a white Southernism
Your experience is similar to mine. I realize “y’all” is perceived as a white Southernism, but perception is not reality, and certainly not a justification for prejudice.
I can’t stand “y’all”. Can’t explain why though.
You’ve probably picked up the prejudice unconsciously from others. It’s amazing how easily that happens — I’ve seen anti-Semitic tropes cheerfully uttered by people who had never seen a Jew. Nothing wrong with not liking any particular usage, of course, just as long as you realize it’s a fact about you and not about the usage. To me, “y’all” is homey and comforting and an excellent thing all around.
Of course, if one’s experience with “y’all” was (say) hearing it ostentatiously used by a bunch of bros trying to impress everyone with how cool they were, I can see how one might come to dislike it. Everyone’s experience is different.
I don’t think I’ve picked it up from someone else. I think it’s most likely because of the contexts in which I often saw it on twitter.
In my mind, southerners who want to distance themselves from the y’all wannabes take care to use all y’all for the plural.
I associate you guys with a pointedly chipper register of women’s speech.
Let us ponder why y’all has spread while yinz languishes in western Pennsylvania.
Other varieties are examined here: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/yall-youuns-yinz-youse-how-regional-dialects-are-fixing-standard-english
‘Y’all’ hasn’t penetrated Hawai’i very much beyond the large military population, in my experience. The most common and ubiquitous equivalent for plurals is ‘you guys’ or, more politely, ‘you folks’, both of which I take to be calques on Japanese -tachi and Korean -deul, suffixes denoting collectives.
I don’t like, specifically, the LGBTQ+ usage of y’all.
It’s the latest instance of a once wildly creative gay culture poaching everything wholesale from black women. Not that I’m calling out an offensive act of cultural appropriation or anything like that, but it is irritating. And now it’s gone corporate. I’m sure if I’d spent more time with my KY kin I’d have warmer feelings about the term. For me, the second-person plural pronoun is exactly the same as the singular, and you just stare into the middle distance trying very hard not to make eye contact with any one person, which is clearly the superior tack.
We all know how those nineteenth-century Belgians were so deeply committed to respect for human rights.
Tok Pisin texting makes liberal use of plural yupela, yupla, upla; dual (yu)tupela, tupla, u2pla; trial (yu)tripela, tripla, u3pla; and variants thereof (like yutla ‘you two’). Some people might also use (yu)popela, popla, u4pla, etc.
We all know how those nineteenth-century Belgians were so deeply committed to respect for human rights
I am reminded (among other things, less beautiful) of
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48344/impossible-to-tell
Agolle Kusaal, having lost the original standalone forms of “we” and “you (pl)”, has created new ones using the proclitic forms along with the catch-all pluraliser word nam, which can be used to make plurals of anything at all when there is no other way, for example with loanwords that can’t be shoehorned into a regular noun class, like du’ata “doctor”, plural du’ata nam. You thus end up with tinam “we-all” and yanam “you-all.” Toende Kusaal has gone one step further, and for “you-all” just uses nam by itself. Not so much “y’all” as just plain “all.”
On a different note, I’ll point out the misuse of the term term. Another blow to elegant variation.
@Y. “In my mind, southerners who want to distance themselves from the y’all wannabes take care to use all y’all for the plural.”
It is possible that “all y’all” arose after “y’all” came to be used as a singular form (its use as a singular form is discussed here: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2009), thus, as a way of maintaining the lexical distinction between singular “you” and plural “y’all.”
@AntC
Youse as a 2nd person plural pronoun is generally a downmarket usage in Australia. When i was at school in the 80s & 90s it was derided as nonstandard. I havent really heard ‘youse’ these days even though it’s much more acceptable to use whatever pronouns you want.
@V
I’m interested in the supply chain issues of getting ?!?Nubians into the Principality of Bulgaria in the 19th century.
@zyxt. “I’m interested in the supply chain issues of getting ?!?Nubians into the Principality of Bulgaria in the 19th century.”
Maybe Olga Todorova’s article Робската институция в България в периода на нейния залез (The Institution of Slavery in Bulgaria in the Period of Decline) will answer your question. See https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=51001.
@ zyxt usage in Australia. … I havent really heard ‘youse’ these days
Very much these days:
Look for youtube videos from ‘Aussie Man’ (strong language warning). He’s aiming for a ocker “generally a downmarket usage”, but I think that’s a for-TV persona.
Some of ABC’s political talking heads and Sky Sports analysis/chat coverage also throws it in. What they _don’t_ use is ‘y’all’.
The 1831 Belgian constitution was apparently much-emulated in its day. According to a volume I googled up entitled “An Historical Introduction to Western Constitutional Law” (R.C. van Caenegem, Cambridge Univ. Pr. 1995) it was imitated by constitutions , some of which may not have lasted very long due to the fortunes of civil war etc., in Spain (1837), Greece (1844 AND 1864), Piedmont-Sardinia (1848, which then evolved into the 1870 constitution of forcibly-unified Italy), Bulgaria (1864 plus the later one mentioned above, I guess), and Romania (1866). Plus it “moreover exerted a considerable influence on the Constitution of Prussia of 1850 and, after the First World War, on those of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.”
Separately, I had thought that the phenomenon of “you guys” being used vocatively by (inter alia) female speakers to address mixed-sex or indeed all-female groups had gotten to the point over the last few decades that the phrase had been safely denuded (as used vocatively) of any marked-for-gender baggage, but this “progressive Gen Z colleagues” etc. narrative suggests not, if true.
When I attended a UN Day celebration in Yap, Micronesia, in October 1974, I was surprised to hear the emcee address the large assembled crowd as ‘you two’ (not ‘all y’all’). I noticed it especially in his saying ‘thank you’ (ka mu magar gow PERF 2PERS tired 2DU, calquing Japanese go-kurou-sama ‘you worked hard’ or o-tsukare-sama ‘you are tired’). My wife, who heard much more Yapese there in her 4 years than I did in my semester, later told me that the use of dual to address a plural formal audience was quite common, a marker of a formal setting. Peace Corps Volunteers used to translate ‘thank you’ into literal ‘you have become tired’ in response to even the most trivial favor done to them, far far more than any Yapese would do: A: Gimme a betelnut! B: Here you are. A: You have become tired (from that great effort).
I am reminded (among other things, less beautiful) of
Ah yes, a fine poem — I remembered it from years ago as soon as I started reading it. Nice to see Pinsky’s still with us (I checked with some trepidation).
@J.W. Brewer: My high school German teacher (born in the late 1930s) told a story about being surprised that his use of “you guys” to refer to a group of Southern ladies was not accepted by those gals themselves. This occurred when he was in college, so probably the late 1950s. Coming from his background (although I cannot recall where in the North he grew up), it had never occurred to him that there was a sex distinction between guys and gals.
You have become tired
For “thank you” In Kusaal you say M pʋ’ʋsya “I greet (you).” Pʋ’ʋs also means “worship” when applied to God, but I’m pretty sure that there’s no such implication in this case (there are actually different gerund forms for the two meanings.) I think the actual concept “worship” is pretty new: you don’t “worship” the local wina that are the object of traditional religious practices, so much as negotiate with them.
If you’re really grateful, you might say Win na sʋŋif “God will help you.”
Kusaasi say “thank you” as much as Europeans; the thing that they don’t say much is “please.” The nearest “equivalent”, M bɛlim nɛ, not only literally means “I’m begging”, but is likewise not the sort of thing you’d say to an equal, or casually.
I prefer “youse guys” myself.
What do y’all think of when you hear the term ‘y’all’? – When I read it here I think of Y.
supply chain issues of getting ?!?Nubians into the Principality of Bulgaria
Well, there are Hungarians of Nubia…
We all know how those nineteenth-century Belgians were so deeply committed to respect for human rights.
If you mean Congo, I am not sure if the scheme has changed. What it was? White people who buy, white people who run the state, locals who work, local soldiers who force the former locals to work. What it is?
If you substitute ‘white’ with ‘local’ in the second element, you can’t mechanically expect change in the third and fourth elements. Two issues with whites in 1890s were commercial interest and indifference (there could be other issues). Both are still here, there is even more of both. I know very little about east Congo, but human rights groups tell rather scary stories about (again) exploitation of resources and bandits controlling it.
@AntC
I suppose my point was that i dont hear ‘youse’ used in conversation. Exceptions being those of my vintage who might still say ‘youse’ occasionally.
Entertainers – and would-be entertainers – like the You Tube guy might as well add in a few other obsolete ockerisms like ‘dont come the raw prawn’ or ‘cobber’ for comic effect. But that doesnt mean that such ockerisms are in everyday use by the general public, or does it?
Just to add, I havent heard ‘youse’ much from the younger crowd.
I like “youse” and I wish it would come into wider usage. It seems to be strong in a few regions, but not really spreading.
Here in California, I have heard “you guys” used by a female speaker to all-female auditors (college age), so I expect that is going to remain.
And I like “you guys” to a mixed audience. Better, anyway, than the equivalent in my idiolect, which would be the less elegant “you lot”.
I’m interested in the supply chain issues of getting ?!?Nubians into the Principality of Bulgaria in the 19th century.
Probably nowhere near as much as you’d naively expect from the geography, since between 1844 and 1867 both areas were nominally in the same country.
(Between 1867 and 1877 they still were, but only for much looser values of “nominally”.)
The Principality of Bulgaria was nominally part of the Ottoman Empire until 1908. And the anecdote that Olga Todorova references is from before the Principality of Bulgaria’s existence, but after the Bulgarian Exarchate’s existence, when it became a separate Millet. Ivan Vazov mentions that when they visited World’s Columbian Exposition, their nationality was written down as “Turkish”.
zyxt:
From a Facebook comment by a young woman (20s, with new-born baby) in Cairns: Tell tom I’ve found yous some more chickens
One swallow does not spring make, but it doesn’t seem to be quite as bad as you make out.
Hannah Gadsby endorses y’all:
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/hannah-gadsby-douglas-trailer-997964/
`She also touches on … her love of the word “y’all.” (“Thank you, the South! What an ally!”)’
Just another data point but…
Hannah Gadsby is always great — thanks for that!
Very late to point this out, but V, Neither Washington nor Jefferson was from the North.
There is, however, no concrete evidence that either Washington or Jefferson ever said “y’all,” which was not yet a stereotypical feature of Southern regional speech in their lifetimes. (Earliest attestation yet located in the relevant sense, in uncontracted form as “you all,” is said to be from 1824, several decades after Washington’s death and only two years before Jefferson’s.)
Two days is hardly “very late” for a reply at Language Hat, where two years is not so unusual.
And a decade-plus not unheard of.
I want to QFT part of the comment by “Will” from the linked LL post:
Earlier this week, I encountered a situation in which a man was looking at three people but was addressing only me. Presumably primed by what he saw, he said, “Y’all can follow me,” then immediately corrected himself to “you” and laughingly chided himself on his bad grammar.