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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

> Interior, small town California has a lot more in common with small-town Texas

Around 10-20% of Californians have "Oakie" heritage (in reality from northern Texas mostly) from the Dust Bowl era.

Working class white Californians who I went to elementary school with in the Bay and Central Valley acted very similar and talk similar to Texans from Dallas-Waco-Austin area (heck, y'all is fairly commonly used in CA as is "heck")

> the emphasis has always been on the difference with Washington, D.C.

We do the same when the GOP comes to power.

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Yup. In addition, a large number of California’s African American population consists of descendants of the Second Great Migration from the South. Many African Americans moved to California in the 1940s and 1950s for job opportunities. I am a third-generation Californian; I have one grandparent from Texas and three from Arkansas. My dad’s side of the family grew up in Bakersfield, where there is a very large population who migrated from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl. My mom’s side didn’t settle in one place (my grandfather was in the military) but they spent a significant amount of time in San Luis Obispo County, Oakland, and Sacramento. We say “y’all” at home (but not in public) and we eat Southern food on special occasions.

> a large number of California’s African American population consists of descendants of the Second Great Migration from the South

Yep!! And a lot of Californians who trace their ancestry to that migration were from Texas and Louisiana due to the Greyhound line.

Y’all just fills a good niche, I think it’s been growing in the urban lexicon because there aren’t any other good replacements, especially if some people don’t like “you guys”

I spent my primary education in Texas and got the heck out for college, for the opportunity available and the life experience, not because of any politics. At some point, I lost my use of “y’all” in my day to day lexicon. It is one of the few things I miss in a sort of lost innocence of youth way.

Idk how you lost it. I feel like I gained it in urban California because there isn't a better way to refer to a group of people in second-person.

In my experience, "y'all" and "folks" outside the South had been used exclusively by liberals of any ancestry during 2010-2020. It's also only in writing, I have never heard it spoken. I figure it was perpetuated by Twitter because the usage has been on a quick decline since Twitter changed ownership.

I went to elementary school before Twitter was a thing.

Twitter is just reflecting a common linguistic pattern found in California that most East Coasters never realized.

People who grew up west of Dallas tend to stay west of Dallas, and people who grew up east of Dallas tend to stay east of Dallas.

Plenty of Westerners (like me) never traveled to the East until college or adulthood, and it's a similar story for East Coasters.

Flight travel has historically been expensive due to the distances.

I lived in California (both SF and LA) for 20 years and haven't heard "y'all" once. I've started hearing "folks" rarely in 2010s when my liberal coworkers wanted to stress how are they compassionate with the "poor folks" only, i.e. nobody used it as a general collective noun (also heard it used to refer to relatives as "my folks" before that). Your experience in elementary school could be different, children generally don't speak the same way adults do.

> I lived in California (both SF and LA) for 20 years and haven’t heard “y’all” once. I’ve started hearing “folks” rarely in 2010s when my liberal coworkers wanted to stress how are they compassionate with the “poor folks” only, i.e. nobody used it as a general collective noun

I’ve lived in California for more than 45 years (periods in each the central part of the Central Valley, LA basin, Bay Area, and Delta), I’ve heard “y’all” a fair amount throughout that time, particularly from Southern transplants and African-Americans, though increasingly common outside that; its common to both Southern dialect and AAVE, and from about the 1990s there’s been more migration from AAVE to more general use in California, not just for that term. “Folks” as a generic collective noun has been even more common.

I lived in california from elementary school through uni, consistently used "you all", and was consistently understood. "All you all", however, was hit or miss. I avoided using double modals unless I knew my audience.

(Having had yankee parents, I never had habitual or completed aspects in my idiolect. my best attempt: "I don't be using habitual aspect")

The AAVE modals ("fixing to" et.al.) have definitely become less segregated in online discourse this century; are they also more common in oral use?

(english lost its second person plural when "you" replaced the original second person singular. "You all" fits that spot perfectly, which would also explain why L2 english speakers also like to use it.)

Two things I think english currently lacks: (a) a good way to distinguish "we" (including addressee) from "we" (excluding them), and (b) a gender-neutral word that could be the equivalent of australian "mate".

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