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In Defense of Y'All

texasmonthly.com

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Re: In Defense of Y'All

#131

Post by alistairSH »

coldpie wrote: post #127
tmtvl wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought 'they' is always plural? I, you, he, she, it, we, you, they.

> I thought 'they' is always plural? You see someone two blocks away doing something unusual and say, "what are they doing?"

Only if you can't determine gender. Otherwise, you'd be "what is she/he doing?"

It's usually clear from context. How often do you look two blocks away and see a group of unrelated individuals doing different things to the point "what are they doing" is unclear? Can't say I've ever run into that in my 48 years.

Re: In Defense of Y'All

#132

Post by harimau777 »

wepple wrote: post #124
skrebbel wrote: post #110

As a non-native English speaker, I love "y'all" because it lets me directly translate our word for, well, "y'all" to English. I seriously struggle to formulate sentences such that it's clear from context that I mean "plural you" in this here case. So what happens is, I start saying a sentence that has "you" in it, and at the "y" I notice that it'll be unclear, I quickly bend it to "y'all", and the day is saved! Hoora…

What’s your word for it?

In Chinese it would be 你们. Pronounced "ni men". The first character means "you" while the second character means "the previous noun is plural".

Re: In Defense of Y'All

#133

Post by alistairSH »

DowsingSpoon wrote: post #98
gregw2 wrote: post #11

I tease non-Texans that Texan English is actually superior to normal American English because it supports second-person plural via "Y'all" exactly as mentioned in this article... "you guys" is, to some ears, sexist, and "youse guys" (a New York-ism) is a little too old-school Italian. English lost its second person plural when we switched from Thou (second person singular formal + Thee=second person singular informal…

No love for “yinz?” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinz

I love "yin"! I have a few friends from western PA and love when they're around so I can use "yinz" freely. Neither of them really use it in day-to-day speech, it's more of a shibboleth of sorts (or whatever the term would be for "look at me, I'm from group X"). Whatever, it's a fun word.

Re: In Defense of Y'All

#134

Post by coldpie »

alistairSH wrote: post #131
coldpie wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought 'they' is always plural? You see someone two blocks away doing something unusual and say, "what are they doing?"

Only if you can't determine gender. Otherwise, you'd be "what is she/he doing?" It's usually clear from context. How often do you look two blocks away and see a group of unrelated individuals doing different things to the point "what are they doing" is unclear? Can't say I've ever run into that in my 48 years.

> Only if you can't determine gender

Sure, that's why I said 2 blocks away. The point is "they" is not exclusively used for plural, which was the claim I was replying to.

Re: In Defense of Y'All

#137

Post by alistairSH »

savanaly wrote: post #2

Proudly use "y'all" frequently in my everyday conversation, despite having zero other attributes characteristically Southern about me. As the article says it's flexible, is impossible to offend anyone with as far as I can tell, and just sounds good.

DC metro native here. I picked it up during college (UVA, in central VA, fair number of southerners on campus). Use it pretty regularly, mostly as part of a group greeting "how are y'all?"

Re: In Defense of Y'All

#138

Post by throw18376 »

mystified5016 wrote: post #100
gregw2 wrote: post #11

I tease non-Texans that Texan English is actually superior to normal American English because it supports second-person plural via "Y'all" exactly as mentioned in this article... "you guys" is, to some ears, sexist, and "youse guys" (a New York-ism) is a little too old-school Italian. English lost its second person plural when we switched from Thou (second person singular formal + Thee=second person singular informal…

This whole thread is extremely confusing to this Appalachian native. Y'all is used quite widely throughout the entire southeast. It's recognized, if not used, through the entire country. I've also seen its use increasing in the Midwest as it seeps out of the south. Do many people actually see this as a novel word? It's incredibly common from my perspective here in Ohio.

in northeast urban areas, if someone uses y’all it means they are probably a left-wing/social justice oriented person. use is correlated with “folks”/“folx”. no idea why, maybe to replace gendered “you guys”. weird but true.

Re: In Defense of Y'All

#139

Post by maxehmookau »

I'm a native British English speaker that works for an American company. I use y'all much to the dislike of my friends and family but it's friendly, and very inclusive. I quite like it.

Re: In Defense of Y'All

#140

Post by richardfontana »

gregw2 wrote: post #11

I tease non-Texans that Texan English is actually superior to normal American English because it supports second-person plural via "Y'all" exactly as mentioned in this article... "you guys" is, to some ears, sexist, and "youse guys" (a New York-ism) is a little too old-school Italian. English lost its second person plural when we switched from Thou (second person singular formal + Thee=second person singular informal…

I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone use "youse guys", but "youse" without "guys" is indeed a now-archaic New Yorkism. However, it doesn't have any particular connection to Italian-American New York other than the fact that "youse" was a native New York dialect formulation that US-born children of Italian immigrants, along with many other ethnic groups, adopted naturally. I understand that "youse" is prevalent in a number of dialects in Ireland and England and presumably spread to New York City through earlier waves of immigration from those places, assuming it wasn't independently re-invented. If I am remembering correctly, "youse" or "yiz" is used in dialogue in Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie:_A_Girl_of_the_Streets) which depicts late-19th-century Irish-American New York characters.

My sense (as a native New York person who grew up around an older generation many of whom naturally used "youse") is that use of "youse" may have been somewhat correlated with being a member of a European-descent pre-WW2-immigration-origin Catholic-identifying ethnic group (so, in particular, Irish, Italian, German), but I'm not even sure that's so.

By the time I was growing up, "youse" was a class and (maybe secondarily) ethnic marker, largely rejected by the Baby Boomers and later generations in favor of the more nationally standard "you guys". If the seemingly redundant "youse guys" occurs at all it must be an odd conglomeration of the older and newer usage.

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