The Pittsburgh second person pronoun yinz has come up here before (e.g., in this 2005 thread); now Ed Simon has a whole LitHub essay about it (apparently an excerpt from his The Soul of Pittsburgh: Essays on Life, Community, and History), tying it to the Glaswegian yins:
The city center of Glasgow, Scotland—that iron-and-glass-forged, cobblestoned fortress of a hilly, rainy, foggy metropolis—is bisected by the dueling high streets of Buchanan and Sauchiehall. There are any number of landmarks to draw your attention if ambling down either of these bustling thoroughfares as the last squibs of Caledonian light fight their losing battle of attrition during a brisk November afternoon.
For six months in 2006, Glasgow was my home across the Atlantic, and I often spent those glum Scottish afternoons in precisely this sort of aimless wandering […] Glasgow, I thought, is kind of like Pittsburgh. And then, walking through Glasgow again, I hear it: “There was a couple other of yins as well.” What? […]
There is more than a spiritual congruence between Glasgow and Pittsburgh, as Kelman’s “yins” would indicate, the s that ends that word so perilously close a sibilant to the z in yinz and the words so nearly used identically. For those unfamiliar with yinz—though I imagine if you’re currently reading this book, you most likely know what it means, albeit it’s becoming increasingly rare in usage—it’s simply the Western Pennsylvania second-person plural, the Pittsburgh equivalent of y’all down South or youse in Jersey and New York.
It is, admittedly to many outside the region (and to some within it), a strange-sounding word. Where there is a certain sense in how you and all can be smoosh-mouthed over time into that aouthern all-purpose word, yinz has a slightly alien quality about it, a combination of sounds that don’t quite make sense, a shibboleth of identity to those who live in Pittsburgh and, apparently, Glasgow. Because Kelman’s “yins” and the “yinz” you hear at Ritter’s Diner in Bloomfield, Gough’s Tavern in Greenfield, Gene’s Place in South Oakland or the Squirrel Hill Café literally have the same origin.
As any good Glaswegian would tell you, yin simply means “one,” but though obscure, it’s actually the same with Pittsburgh’s most distinctive linguistic attribute. Just as “y’all” is a compression of two other words, so does “yinz” come from you ones. That phrase is a direct translation of the Gallic Scots, where the second-person plural is perfectly grammatically correct.
Calling it the “most salient morphosyntactic feature of local speech,” Carnegie Mellon University rhetoric professor Barbara Johnson explains in her study Speaking Pittsburghese: The Story of a Dialect (published as part of the prestigious Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics series) that “‘yinz’ was brought to America by Scotch-Irish immigrants… the descendants of Protestant people from Scotland and northern England.” From the shores of the Clyde then to the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio, it seems that my ears on Sauchiehall and Buchanan weren’t in error. […]
Because there are few famous examples of a Pittsburgh dialect—Michael Keaton speaks with a wonderful accent, especially as the character Beetlejuice, and outsider Nick Kroll does a fairly good imitation in the skit “Pawnsylvania” from his national sketch comedy show—it tends to confuse people. When entering a hardware store in the small Massachusetts town that I lived in for two years, there was simply incredulity and incomprehension at how I was speaking (though perhaps that was just Boston friendliness). They had none of the r’s, and I had all of them. They thought that I was a pirate.
As an accent, Pittsburgh English may be centered in the city, but today it’s more likely to be heard in the outer counties of Western Pennsylvania. Linguistically it’s clearly a variation on northern Appalachian English; yinz or some permutation is frequently heard in western Maryland, eastern Ohio and the West Virginia panhandle. Within Pittsburgh, the accent has a curious aspect to it: that vaguely twangy Appalachian pronunciation with all those loan words from Polish, Neapolitan and Yiddish, making the dialect sound a bit like if somebody from Brooklyn was doing a really poor imitation of somebody from Kentucky, an urban Deadwood kind of talk.
Pittsburghese, Western Pennsylvania English or, technically, the North American North Midland dialect—however you choose to identify the accent, what’s unassailable is that such a way of speaking is strongly identified with the archetypal figure of the Yinzer. As a Townie or a Southie is to Boston, so is the Yinzer to Pittsburgh.
He then goes on to discuss Yinzers at great length. At any rate, the OED includes yinz under the α forms of you-uns (entry revised 2012):
2006 Yinz was drivin’ pretty fast back there.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Nexis) 24 September h6
And the etymology is:
< you pron. + the plural of one pron. (see forms at that entry). On the pattern of use with plural and singular reference compare discussion at you-all pron. With the formation compare also you-alls pron.¹, yez pron., yous pron., and also later we-uns pron.
Notes
Compare similarly you yins, yous yins (with plural reference) in 19th- and 20th-cent. Scots use: see Sc. National. Dict. at ane adj. and at yin pron.Since the second half of the 20th cent. the α forms (especially yinz, yunz) have come to be considered as a defining characteristic of the speech of the inhabitants of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Thanks, Nick!
What on earth is Gallic Scots?
@JeninEd: If either of my late Pittsburgh-raised paternal uncles had tried to say “Gaelic” and it came out sounding like “Gallic” I … would not have been surprised. These are people who would pronounce the first component morpheme of Irn-Bru as a monosyllable rhyming with “yarn.”
Oh, I say Gaelic and Gallic more or less the same, but Gaelic Scots doesn’t make any sense either. Were they thinking of Doric? That’s the north east, though, so Lallans?
What on earth is Gallic Scots?
As JWB suggests, he presumably meant “Gaelic.” This is why people need copyeditors.
Yes, a sufficiently savvy copyeditor might have pointed out that, spelling aside, “Gaelic Scots” is not the best thing to say when you actually mean “Scottish Gaelic.”
One Trans-atlantic difference is that AFAIK Pittsburghese does not have a singular “yin”: Pgh. “yinz” is plurale tantum. Whereas by contrast the Glaswegian comedian Billy* Connolly is also known as “the Big Yin,” which is apparently a perfectly idiomatic nickname.
*Apparently now also more poshly known as “Sir William Connolly CBE.”
So, apparently they’re not connected at all, the Pittsburgh version being contracted from you ones while the Glaswegian version is simply ones?
That sounds like Scottish Gaelic has a 2pl pronoun (big surprise there), and that Pgh. yinz is a calque of that.
It’s true that ‘you anes’ is grammatical in Scots – it hadn’t occurred to me that ‘you ones’ might not be grammatical in English. There’s no Gaelic equivalent, though, so I don’t know why it would come in at all.
I suppose ‘yinz’ is kind of a cousin of Scots ‘wean’=child, which is originally ‘wee ane’.
Echoing + Responding to David Marjanović’s point, “you ones” does NOT look like a direct translation of Scottish Gaelic (Incidentally, “Gallic Scots”, sounds, to me, like an unusually strongly French-influenced variety of Scots: I am trying to imagine Robbie Burns being recited with a Québec French accent and realization of French-looking words, for some reason) at all: Scottish Gaelic has plural “sibh” and singular “thu”, expressing second person: both pronouns go back to Old Irish, and indeed probably to Proto-Celtic.
So “yinz” may be due to Scottish Gaelic influence (bilinguals would have created a plural second person plural pronoun, distinct from the second person singular one, because they had one in their L1) but is not a direct translation (As “sibh” is certainly monomorphemic for Scottish Gaelic speakers).
And as a diachronic explanation it is quite insufficient: English is quite unusual in NOT making a singular/plural distinction obligatory with second person pronouns, yet only some varieties of English in contact with other languages have felt the need to create a second person plural pronoun. So: assuming that contact with another language is indeed part of the reason for such pronouns arising in some types of English, what other factors are required?
We have actually had Gallic Scots here, it suddenly occurs to me – a letter written by Mary Queen of Scots.
(In a post originally about ladybirds, for no very obvious reason.)
Direct link to the delightful, if self-describedly evil, letter.
Jen, “you-uns” is certainly grammatical in West Virginia.
In Northern Ireland, websites like Slugger O’Toole use the meta shorthand “them’uns” and/or “us’uns” to denote us-v-them cross-community bitching, you-started-it, and whataboutery.
This reliance on Ulster Scots words to signal closemindedness might be considered bias of the elite against the demotic, or a default of the Protestant/ Unionist/ Loyalist/ British as the likelier bad guys; I can’t say how often in practice it is so considered — at least some of the irony is deliberate.
I’d be loth to disagree with Jim Kelman, but “There was a couple other of yins as well” doesn’t sound right to me (originally from, and long returned to Glasgow, but wouldn’t have been encouraged to use ‘yin’ or ‘youse’ as a child). ‘A couple other yins’ would sound right, but that ‘of’ jars.
Also, I would tend to say that ‘youse’ was the second-person pronoun (‘yousens’ seems more Irish), and that ‘yin’ is just a locally preferred pronunciation of ‘one’, in contexts like ‘…other yins’. But I’ve no statistics to back that up, and writing this, I discover that, suddenly, when I say in my head _any_ variant of a likely sentence, it sounds wrong, and more like badly-written cod-jockery than Evidence.
Re the gaelic/gallic thing: yes, ‘gallic scots’ is surely wrong (unless, as pointed out, someone’s making a complicated Auld Alliance joke). The author might have been thinking of ‘Scots gaelic’ (pronounced ‘gallic’) in contrast to Irish gaelic (pronouncd ‘gaylic’).
It’s not unreasonable that there might be some influence between gaelic and scots since, when folk left the West Highlands, Glasgow was and is the Big City they’d most naturally go to, but I’m sure any influence would be well buried by now, since Glasgow was never a gaelic-speaking area (despite ScotRail determinedly putting up gaelic-language alternative signs for railway station names even in areas which went straight from brythonic to english).
@Rodger C.: My Pgh-born-and-raised father will say “you’uns” — not fully elided down to “yinz” – on the comparatively rare occasions when he tries to illustrate the Pgh dialect of his youth, which he (unlike his late brothers) largely shed in later life after moving away from the region. I’m not competent to say whether this is an authentic insight into an earlier chronological stratum of the dialect or just an error resulting from having been separated by many decades from the lived experience of it.
Separately re “youse” and Scotland: aficionados of the relevant style and/or time period of music will know that of all the songs on the Pogues’ classic 1985 _Rum, Sodomy & the Lash_ LP, the only one where the lead vocal is not sung by the late Shane MacGowan is “I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Everyday,” where the vocal is instead done by the band’s then-bassist Cait O’Riordan. Late last year Cait flew over from her now-home in NYC to Ireland to sing it at Shane’s funeral, but the relevant point here is that the song first pops up in recorded form in 1960 as “I’m a Man Youse Don’t Meet Everyday,” sung a cappella by that interesting Scottish lady Jeannie Robertson. Who was not from Glasgow but from Aberdeenshire and from a “Traveller” ethnic/family background to boot, although I don’t know whether that would have been expected to affect her idiolect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhkLy_ZM03Q
The pronunciation I heard in Scotland has the PALM vowel – it’s identical to non-rhotic garlic.
Scotland generally has the trap-palm merger, so I don’t know how much that means – the OED says TRAP, I can’t really comment as I can rarely tell the difference!
Norman: I misread that as ‘a couple of other yins’, which I suspect is what was intended. (The ‘of’ could be left out, but ‘cupla ither yins’ with the ‘of’ just about hanging on seems more likely.)
Influence on 19th century Glasgow English is as likely to have been from Irish…
JWB: I don’t think ‘youse’ is an east/west shibboleth, although ane/yin might be.
Rodger: I don’t *think* it is in standard (English) English – I have to say ‘you lot’
Or “you lovely lot” even.
Sauchiehall
Saucie ‘willow’; cognate with salix, I presume?