> I still say "y'all" but I say it with no Texan drawl, which sounds a bit odd to people, I think.
We say it in Western Massachusetts, but it's clipped, more like "Can I help yal?"
We say it in Western Massachusetts, but it's clipped, more like "Can I help yal?"
“Ya’ll” is linguistically necessary in English since the word “ye” was deprecated.
A common alternative to remove ambiguity between singular and plural “you” in some parts of the US is “you guys”.
Ye is a second-person, plural, personal pronoun (nominative), spelled in Old English as "ge". [0]
The word thou is a second-person singular pronoun in English. It is now largely archaic, having been replaced in most contexts by the word you. [1]
We deprecated ye and thou, but it’s the latter that “requires” y’all, because only thou (relative to us still having you) distinguishes the number of people.
Edit: put another way, “thou/thee is the one with number” meant that reintroducing them would create a number distinction.