In Defense of Y'All | Hacker News Reader

In Defense of Y'All

texasmonthly.com

169 pointsscour360 comments

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) and Ye (second person plural) to just "You", but Texans rightly have solved the problem and kept the clarity. (The more-modern "Yo" is delightfully brief but as ambiguous as "you".)

Now... if you want to tease a Texan back about all this, you can ask them whether that implies the proper phrase for when you enter Texas then should be "Abandon hope all y'all (was: ye) who enter here!"

> "you guys" is sexist

is it though?

> to some ears

OP added that after the reply.

Though often used in a gender neutral way, "guys" is definitely more male than "y'all".

but the question was about "you guys" which is a distinct phrase that happens to share a word.

IIRC guy part is actually descended from Guy Faux, which in itself is cool.

(edit: fix grammar)

Which itself seems to be related to the word "guy" as in "guy wire" also related to "guide", "guidance", or "guidelines". Meaning to lead, direct, or conduct. To show the way.

Fun litmus test, if the person challenging this assertion happens to be a straight male: "how many guys have you slept with?"

I'd guess this depends on region/demographic, but at least in my circles on the west coast, "guys" is gendered when it's used to describe or identify people in the third person, but it's gender-neutral when used to address a group of people in the second person.

So "the guys" or "how many guys" always refers to men, but "you guys" carries no implication of gender at all. I often hear people address groups consisting entirely of women as "guys", and nobody bats an eye.

Yes agreed. In most regions/groups in America, "you guys" does not carry the same meaning as "a group of guys"

Also for reference, these are "compound nouns" - a single noun composed of multiple words. No one has these issues with "ice cream", for example, but "you guys" really is just another one of these.

I think it makes sense to say "you guys" is a compound noun, but the word "guys" can be used in this gender-neutral addressing-a-group sense outside of the phrase "you guys". For example: "Hey guys!", or "Guys, what should I eat for lunch?"

It's not sexist at all, and anyone who objects to it on those grounds is flat out looking for excuses to be offended.

So you're willing to just brush off a large groups complaints with a phrase entirely meant to address groups?

In communication there are senders and receivers.

You can receive something a certain way that was not intended by a sender.

It's important to try to understand the intent of the sender. In this case, many cultures sending the message "you guys" don't internally view this as relating to gender.

You could try to change their culture because many people receive it wrong, or you could learn about the culture and try to change the receivers culture.

Sometimes you can't accept the differences because it's perpetuates too much harm.

Where to draw the line is an ongoing and difficult question.

This reminds me of when they tried to de-gender Spanish and the vast majority of native Latinos hated it, Google still refuses to back down on “Latinx”

"Sexist" does feel like too strong a word. "Gendered" perhaps more appropriate.

"Guys" is certainly gendered, so I understand folks feeling like "you guys" is as well.

It depends. Are you attracted to guys?

Depends. Is there a difference between the phrase "Handprint4469 like fucking guys", and "Handprint4469 likes fucking you guys", pointing over to your mom and your sister?

Maybe OP meant gendered?

As ‘guy’ is normally a male.

But sexist would imply that it degrades either women or men, which I don’t think it does in this case?

We still use "ye" for 2nd person plural in (much of) Ireland

Except of course working-class Dublin, where its "yous" or "yis"

And I've heard "yousuns" in the North

In Early Modern English, you is inherently plural; the singular form is thou.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou

thou is the singular intimate. (compare the tu- form, in french).

You could be singular or plural, but it was always formal. (compare the vous- form, in french)

Knowing this puts a whole new spin on things like the KJV, since as moderns we hear "thou" and think "fancy old timey speech! very formal!" and it is exactly the opposite.

Quakers/Friends chose the thou- form as the preferred form to address everyone; this was part of their scandalous behavior at the time, because it was heard as being entirely improper. (For their part, Quakers figure we're all equal before God, so why pay too much attention to social status? -- and that's not a bad point, really!)

I was taught Biblical Hebrew by an Australian scholar who learned hers in the south of the US, and I picked up from her the habit of translating the second plural as "y'all" :-) You can of course do the same with Greek. For some reason I preferred "y'all" to the more Australian "youse."

I don't know for “you”, but the French « vous » (or e.g. вы, вие, etc.) are only formal in the singular form, otherwise they're just bog standard 2pp.

We have an English equivalent for "todos vosotros" as well!

Old English had dual pronouns too: https://oldenglish.info/pro3.html

People in some parts of the UK say "yous" for second person plural. So it isn't quite gone.

We also have that in some parts of Canada, rural & northern Ontario especially.

Rural Wisconsin too, though mostly the older generations.

It's very much perceived as a vaguely "redneck" or "hoser" way of speaking here.

Another similar dialect isogloss-ish that often goes with that is dropping the past-tense "I saw" and replacing it with the past-participle "I seen". Or, alternatively, another way of putting it is that it's dropping the "have" in "I've seen"

Middle class parents and teachers definitely scolded kids for speaking this way when I was growing up. Was seen as lower class.

The Dictionary of American Regional English (I first heard about it in A Way With Words - https://waywordradio.org/johnny-on-the-spot/ )

https://www.daredictionary.com/search?q=yous&searchBtn=

While I don't have a subscription to it (I haven't justified $50/year for that to myself) you will see that "youse" comes up with an "explore more" for Great Lakes, North Midland, and Northeast and "youse-all" shows up as Middle Atlantic.

We do on the West Coast of Scotland at least.

We also say "youse" in Australia (or at least my region of Australia, it's definitely informal though)

Since moving overseas and studying other languages (Slavic and Baltic languages) I think it's definitely something needed in English. I think I still use youse, I never note it. It's just something that's so naturally useful it wouldn't occur to me that I'm saying something weird or forced.

I did not know "ye" was second person plural. I'm bringing it back. Ye can thank me later.

Yeah “ye” as in “avast ye scallywags”

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.

Yinz is literally the only evidence available that that part of PA isn't actually West Virginia.

I hadn't heard that one. My ex-father-in-law (from an Appalachian upbringing) was big on "you 'uns". "Yinz" reminds me of that.

Except that, in at least some circles, "y'all" can be used to refer to one person.

When this happens the other people are implicit: for example "have y'all got Coke?" to a waiter at a restaurant, where "y'all" refers to all the people involved in the restaurant.

(The answer one does not want to hear, at least in Georgia, is "is Pepsi OK?")

There’s a lesser known ironic variation where y’all is sort of the opposite of the “royal we”, aka the majestic plural.

To take someone down a peg if they seem full of themselves, you can use the majestic singular satirically. As in: I just got a fancy new car! Gosh, did y’all get seat warmers with it too?

Because Coke is Soda?

In said circles you can use the bigger plural, "all y'all".

And yes, this is a real expression that is used in parts of the US, not pure comedy.

I grew up in the deepest of the deep South. Never did I ever hear "y'all" refer to a single person. I don't know where this trope originated. "Y'all" is definitely plural.

Seconded. In my entire North Carolina + Georgia upbringing, with frequent visits to Tennessee and back to NC, and some visits to South Carolina, Florida, and Alabama...never once have I heard y'all referring to a single person.

It's literally a contraction for "you all". That doesn't make sense for talking to one person.

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.

On the west coast or northeast it would be very surprising to hear someone say it.

I'm in Maine and say it all the time, but I'm definitely unusual in that regard.

an aggressively progressive set of new yorkers practically bullied me into using it a decade ago over concerns of sexism so at least when talking about people in those places in tech I can't say I share your experience. lots of coastal progressives say y'all nowadays. it's "inclusive"

I also hear people say "folks" when that is also borrowed from Southern US English

I say y'all because it has one less syllable than the other options while retaining clarity

Yeah in the PNW, I commonly hear the progressive/inclusive “y’all,” the AAVE “y’all,” and the southern transplant “y’all” - but personally I never use it unless doing it satirically.

I wasn’t raised to say it, and unfortunately I’ve got this lingering association with southern racist / ignorant hillbillies usage the term. “Y’all better get along now y’hear?” So it always feels weird coming out of my mouth.

Here in Massachusetts, I don't hear it often, but when I use it nobody even blinks an eye at it. It's well understood.

Maybe surprising to hear white people saying it, but most black people (or people who grew up in predominantly black neighborhoods) throughout the US have been using it for a long time. I would assume that's a byproduct of The Great Migration.

I've lived in the northeast my whole life, and I don't remember ever being surprised at the idea of someone saying it. That's at least partially because I'm just used to the idea of people I interact with potentially not being from the northeast though. Even at a young age in the suburb I grew up in (with around 25k population, so not a particularly huge one), it was pretty common to encounter people who came from other states or countries. I guess if you're from a town small enough you might not be as used to interacting with people from other places, but is that really a regional thing or just a small town thing?

> Do many people actually see this as a novel word?

Where I live, yeah. I live in Minnesota and I intentionally use "y'all" here because I think it neatly fills the need and I want it to catch on, but it definitely feels like an affectation. It's not something you hear unless someone is from out of town or going out of their way to use it intentionally (like me).

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.

Yep, it also replaces "ladies and gentlemen" and is a more informal "people."

I've heard of the the mythical gender neutral guys but having spent my life in classes and a career field where being the only woman is the standard, the amount of times folks are like "good morning guys… and girl" or "good morning fellas… and lady" is just comical at this point. Clearly speakers aren't imaging a mixed group when they say it.

It's been the same for me in the midwest and northeast.

Maybe it's that they were intending to address a group, but then realised that what they said might cause offence so they corrected themselves.

I think it's not so much they imagined what they were saying before they said it, it's that they reached for the handy phrase for addressing a group without thinking, and then only afterwards realised it. At least that's what I would do.

I wonder what it would feel like if I joined a majority female class and was addressed as "good morning ladies, and man". I've never been in the situation unfortunately.

Another phrase would be good. I vote for youse all.

Except that northeast urban areas are famously rife with transplants from all over the country, including me, who uses "y'all" because y'all don't know what "yinz" means.

Checking in from Louisiana, can confirm I hear and say "y'all" on a near daily basis.

Yeah there are three types of Americans: those who say y'all, those who don't use it personally but are quite familiar with it, and no hablo ingles.

You can always find the imposter when you see ya'll written. Some people just don't understand contractions.

I'm from the midwest with family from the deep south. I've ported y'all to NYC, but it took some convincing to get folks to be comfortable with using it.

After moving to Texas, I adopted it for this reason. It's easy to slide in an no one will be offended.

After moving away from Texas, y'all was the one obvious thing that would give me up. I don't have a Texas drawl unless I'm really tired or putting on airs. Howdy was another one, but used much less frequently.

Another word from Texas that drives me crazy is "heighth". I don't know why people add the h at the end when they say it, but nobody spells it that way.

I say Bolth instead of Both but never noticed until recently

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.

My native dialect is Italian-American South Philly, and "youse" occurs there too, although it may have literally died out by now.

"yous" (slightly different s sound) is also common among the rural older generations in German and Dutch immigrant areas. My grandma used it all the time, though not with the double plural "youse guys", just "yous"

My grandmother fit that ethnic profile, and used "yous" as well.

Linked in another comment... The Dictionary of Regional American English https://www.daredictionary.com/search?q=yous&searchBtn=

Being in the midlands of Ireland, I say ye; but I believe that yous is more of a think in Dublin and the north.

(In practise, I write ye more than I say it, I think.)

As a native midwesterner, I get more annoyed and defensive than I should when people complain that “you guys” isnt gender neutral. Where I come from, everyone is “a guy”.

It can mean “male person”, but that’s only if you use it in specific contexts that brings up gender (like saying “guys and gals”).

This would be plausible if I had ever heard a straight man talk about the guys he had dated.

The context of dating makes it no longer gender neutral. ("Guys and gals")

But I've definitely heard people refer to groups composed entirely of women as "you guys".

I've still never heard, for example "this guy" when referring to eg a specific female coworker. I live in the midwest. "You guys" is frequently used as a genderless plural sure I guess but "guy" is not gender neutral.

Right, it's only the plural that's gender neutral. Kinda like how in Spanish "abeula" means "grandma", "abuelas" means "grandmas", and "abuelo" means "grandpa", but "abuelos" means "grandparents", not "grandpas". The masculine plural is gender inclusive in most contexts.

Ok but that's a different claim than the one I was originally replying to.

And anyway the masculine plural being genderless is a convention of romance languages, which english is not. It is not useful or consistent to describe expectations for english usage in terms of the features of other languages. Negative concord and invariant be are common language features globally but you don't hear white americans scrambling to include them in standard usage.

There are plenty of other situations in English where the masculine plural is gender inclusive (probably because so much of English is borrowed from romance languages). For example, "actors" can refer to both male and female actors, "actresses" cannot.

Identity politics has resulted in certain groups making concerted efforts to try to eliminate such usages, but it's still an ingrained part of our language.

Singular example:

If you call a plumber and they say “I’ll send a guy over”, there’s no implication that it’s male. Singular and genderless.

Not sure I agree.

Context changed the use of language. If you know any foreign languages you know two words that are more or less the same carry a different meaning in context.

Because it's for group greetings and not addressing individuals. e.g. My female friend from Long Island uses it to address her friends in group settings but never has referred to her wife as "guy" and neither has anyone I ever knew growing up in NY.

I don't think people outside the midwest understand just how ubiquitous "you guys" is here. After a previous time this discussion occurred on HN, I had to chuckle to myself when I heard my sister address a group of little girls as "you guys". It's our version of "y'all".

Midwest? I thought it was just a West Coast thing! (Also extremely ubiquitous in SoCal.)

It’s both

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9cw3gb/you_guys_v_...

SoCal it can also be replaced with dude/dudes

This is true. Sometimes I'll even address my wife as "dude"...

Even as far west as Colorado we used it the same way when I was young. Then I got a job at an NYC company and the gendered-ness of it was frowned upon. I actually switched to "ya'll" and it worked great. All the New Yorkers just thought that's how Coloradoans talk. So, thanks Texas.

Totally unrelated but this Blaze Foley song talks specifically about getting back to a place "where the people say ya'll." It's beautiful:

https://blazefoley.bandcamp.com/track/clay-pigeons

I am another Midwesterner who has largely switched from "you guys" to "y'all" (nit: ya'll is not considered correct spelling) after some lengthy and heated Slack discussions between Midwesterners and West Coast at $previousJob.

P.S. Michael Cera does a nice cover of that song.

Dude nice thanks!

That's just corporate culture, not NY

I grew up using guys just to refer to group of people

It's PC tech culture.

> All the New Yorkers just thought that's how Coloradoans talk.

I love it. I blame France, specifically Remulac.

My first job was as a host at Red Lobster. I was reprimanded for saying "How are you guys doing today?" as I was seating a group of ladies. 16-year old me was trying my best to be polite, but language changes over time and that was one of my first introductions to code switching.

> language changes over time

But this language has not been changing over time. This was a dictate from HR departments, made up from whole cloth. If anything has changed over time, it's that "gals" has been an anachronism for a long while, outside of a few isolated corners of the Southern and Western US where it can still manage to sound cute in some contexts. We don't really need a special diminutive for groups of women.

That being said, it's not formal language, it's chummy. If you're a 16 year old host at a restaurant speaking to a group of women older than you, you probably shouldn't be chummy.

I'd hardly call Red Lobster formal. "Red Lobster Hospitality, LLC is an American casual dining restaurant chain," according to Wikipedia.

Any interaction a 16 year old employee has with a group of strange women who are customers and are older than him should be respectful.

I maintain that the sentence shows no disrespect to my Midwestern sensibilities. It's considered common courtesy to ask someone how their day is going, and I don't consider "you guys" to be a sign of disrespect. In fact, it seems quite clear to me that the parent was attempting to be warm and welcoming.

Warm and welcoming sure but too casual, you guys IMO implies familiarity, I wouldn't use it with strangers, could be regional or generational but that's my rural Illinoian take. Y'all is more flexible.

Fascinating - I'm from Michigan, and I would say "y'all" sounds more casual to my ears than "you guys." Formal speaking (in contrast to casual speaking) often eschews contractions.

I agree with the other poster. Missourian and "y'all" is ridiculously less formal than "you guys". To me, "y'all" is specifically informal and is used in exactly that manner, even in corporate emails. It denotes a more conversational tone that's open to feedback. "You guys" does not exist within formal/informal for me, it's either, neither, or both, just depending on what you say around it.

"How are you guys doing today" spoken at a red lobster is absolutely fine, completely normal language, whether spoken by the president or by a child. It's the single most ubiquitous and wholly normal greeting that i know. Corporate really over does it sometimes

That manner of social formality set sail a good 25 years ago my friend. On one hand I find it a shame, it was useful, on the other, it was also often misused (still exists in Korea where I now live, and it's abused like crazy here).

You spend too much time on a computer. Please stay out of the Midwest. Thank you.

> I was reprimanded for saying "How are you guys doing today?" as I was seating a group of ladies.

By one of the ladies, or by a manager who overheard you?

Yep. When I first encountered it years ago, that was my take. You'll for Midwesterners. Cool.

Well, I mooched it, and have seen it propagate here in the Northwest. Will not be long before it takes more general hold as we exchange people.

I seem to be bumping into it here (PDX) area more these days.

My favorite bit in all this is:

"All Y'all" which is simply plural for "Y'all", plus a subtle bit of familiarity state info.

If everyone is close, in agreement, likely to act as one, then "y'all" works for single as well as multiple people.

All y'all gets invoked when the group has differences. Maybe a few couples, or some people are new, or may be disagreeable in some way.

English is a lot of fun, because it allows for a very robust ad-hoc communication. Over time, the lexicon is never dull!

You guys is the default on the East Coast too. It wasn't until very recently that people started being concerned about it being a gendered term.

It's a sentiment that's only come up in the past 15 years. Same with the "Latinx" bullshit (that white people came up with)

latinx is nothing compared to "folx"

Isn't "folx" lingo or jargon? Like, let me explain a bit...

Just like "shade", "tea", and other queer lingo that was predominantly used within the queer community, "folx" was originally (in recent usage) a term that was used by some queer folk as a signal to indicate safety and inclusiveness.

But like "shade", some outsiders heard that jargon and started using it in communities where it wasn't common, and didn't carry the original intent, and so it looked confusing or annoying.

I think it's fine for communities to have vernacular words that are understood within their community, I suspect the real "villains" here to you are the folk who pull that jargon out and try to make it widespread.

People absolutely say "folks" in person nowadays (of course you wouldn't be able to hear a distinction between "ks" and "x"). It's common (although, yes, mediated by subculture) around where I live.

I grew up in a culture where nobody had a problem with "you guys". I am really not that old, and I still live in the same city.

As for "not carrying the original intent" - I don't see how there's any meaningful difference in intent.

Folx is exclusively a written construct. It's not the same as folks. They do sound the same though.

> I grew up in a culture where nobody had a problem with "you guys".

Did no one have a problem? Or did no one voice a problem? I'd believe the latter, but I don't know how it would be possible to know the former.

These are all black American words, not "queer lingo." Other than "folks" which is Southern, but comes to upper-middle class white people through Obama's act of pretending he had ever met black Americans before college at UCLA.

They come from the long tradition of gay men copying black American female mannerisms, not anything "queer."

> I suspect the real "villains" here to you are the folk who pull that jargon out and try to make it widespread.

Gay men have contributed a lot to world culture, they're not villains.

Go watch Paris is Burning. They absolutely are Black queer lingo for decades prior to them becoming known outside Black communities. Which then became queer lingo. Which then became popular lingo.

> Gay men have contributed a lot to world culture, they're not villains

Absolutely, I never insinuated otherwise. I also don't believe it's villainous to share one's culture and lingo. But the op who objected to folx appears to think that it is bad. Take it up with them!

Since when is "folks" limited to black Americans? It was being heard in households across America for 50 years from Loony Tunes and the news.

They are referring to "shade" and "tea". Eg in "That's the tea. All tea, no shade."

Meaning "that's the truth, the straight truth, no disrespect intended".

These terms rose in popularity in the ballroom scene in New York. (Note: not ballroom dancing, but rather "drag ball" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_culture). The culture of that scene was predominantly Black and Latino.

Latinx is a thing that's at least debated, if not widely used.

I've never seen "folx."

Douglas Hofstadter rails against "you guys" in his 1997 "Le Ton beau de Marot", and I'm sure he wasn't the first.

Evidence that white people came up with Latinx? My sense was always that Hispanic leftists came up with it, and it was then amplified by their white leftist friends.

Which is maybe a distinction without a difference, and I realize that you were probably just making a pithy statement. But I think its important if we want to examine how something like that actually came to be.

It's true! But it's also imprecise because of that ambiguity. Take the following construction, "Now, all you guys are going to step off the dance floor."

Which could mean everyone clear out, or just the fellahs.

I don't get worried about people preferring a term that isn't "you guys", because it's probably an improvement to the language over all, even if it's some friction to change.

I don't think anyone would use that construction though in the midwest if they only meant the men. If they wanted all the guys to get off the dance floor they would say "Now, all the guys are going to step off the dance floor." "The guys" is much different than "you guys", at least where I live.

Granted, it is murky so I also don't really care about switching to y'all. The only problem I have with "y'all" is that it is such a southern thing that using it to me with my midwest accent sounds forced and awkward (At least to my ears).

This doesn't seem ambiguous. "All you guys are" seems to be narrowing the focus of the sentence, because otherwise it would be more fluidly spoken as "all of you are", and it sounds unnatural to add to the sentence for no other purpose. (It sounds somewhat unnatural under either interpretation, though). If it had been "you guys are all", perhaps that would be ambiguous, but only with a strong emphasis on the word 'guys', which is not how the phrase is normally spoken. Either way I'd expect the dance teacher to be using hand gestures at the same time to indicate which people they're giving directions to.

Right, the problem isn't that this usage is invalid, it's that it's highly dependent on a specific context.

"Guys" means "people". I have grown up in the Midwest as well where it's common to hear girls and women use it to address all-female groups. It's basically like how "mankind" or "man" is short for "humankind" or "human" and not for "male". These are also backed up in dictionaries that are more than a few years old

One of my former employers only a few years ago announced that they would ban the term "guys" because some people thought it was sexist. The ban was droppped because many people openly objected to the needless censorship while others simply saw no problem with the word and naturally just kept on using it. It was around the same time when coders and real estate agents were working to ban the term "master" from everything

I’ve said “you guys” all my life (grew up in the northeast) but I’m a professor and teach mixed-gender classes from all over the world. Plenty of people are completely fine with “guys” as a gender neutral term and express bafflement that there would be a problem. However: a non-trivial percentage find it weird, not necessarily because HR told them to, but because it really sounds odd to them. One person asked me if it would sound normal to ask “how many guys have you dated recently” and I took their point that this would indeed sound very gendered.

The lesson is: things that sounded normal to you and your peer group growing up might not work in the larger and more culturally diverse world you encounter professionally. So why insist on them? I’ve switched to “you folks” which makes me sound like I’m about to lead a square dance, but people seem to find it disarming.

"guys" is nongendered when it is a colletive noun.

"how many guys have you dated" is not a collective noun.

In 18th century England it used to refer to women. The point being that language usage has both regional and temporal variance, so why not avoid terms that some people might find uncomfortable? I’m offering this not as a dictate from the language police, but as a suggestion to improve your effectiveness as a professional communicator - a skill that is highly correlated with long-term career success.

but why is the prescription for speakers to converge on a single homogenous blob of usage rather than encouraging listeners to acknowledge and understand the diversity of uses?

(Non native English speaker) I find adressing a mixed group of people as 'you guys' has coolness to it. "You guys get the freakin' job done"

> Where I come from, everyone is “a guy”.

Gen Alpha (and younger Zoomers) are working hard to make "bro", "bruh" and "dude" gender-neutral[1] everywhere - and they are succeeding. In decade, those complaining about "you guys" will seem quaint.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/184ni9j/does_any...

> bruh

"breh" was and will be gender-neutral in south Louisiana long after everyone else has forgotten any debates around whether or not it actually is or whatever it was co-opted from

have a feeling hawaiians feel similarly about "brah"/"braddah"

My 14 year old daughter and her female friends call each other "bro" all the time.

I’m on the west coast. I was talking to a neighbor about their barking dog and exclaimed “dude!” when she lied directly to my face (her dog was barking and she said it wasn’t her dog). Her reaction? Angrily saying she was a woman. Dude has been gender neutral for many decades around these parts.

I thought that Thou was informal, froma wikipedia "For a long time, however, thou remained the most common form for addressing an inferior person"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou#History

Also in etymonline "By c. 1450 the use of thou to address inferiors gave it a tinge of insult"

https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Thou

"Thee" isn't the informal form of "thou", it's the oblique form, ie "the bell tolls for thee", you'd never say "the bell tolls for thou", no matter how formal or informal.

In early modern English, thou and thee were both the informal 2pp, with thou being the subject pronoun and thee being the object pronoun. Thou/you is similar to tu/vous. Eventually, thou became archaic, and we think of archaic words as being more formal.

(Aside: In Middle English, ye was strictly plural, but ye became acceptable as formal singular as well, again paralleling vous. And as an additional aside, in the "ye olde English" phrase, the ye is actually þe, where þ is thorn, which wasn't available when the printing press came to England.)

Yep, exactly!

Misread your comment as saying that thee wasn't informal =)

No, I edited it to clarify, I meant "it is informal, but that's not the distinction".

I think it's a bit of a stretch to say "y'all" somehow belongs to Texas, it's roots are almost certainly in other areas of the South and Appalachia where it is still used just as frequently as it is in modern-day Texas.

My friend from North Carolina gave me a t-shirt that's just an outline of the state, and "Ya'll" on the front. So I think you're right.

“Ya’ll” is the spelling used by carpetbagger poseurs.

Wow. Way to pick a hill.

It's not worth a fight, but I can confirm I've only seen "ya'll" written by non-southern or Appalachian residents. I'm not saying it doesn't happen or shouldn't happen, but it would make me wonder about whether someone has adopted the word as a choice vs. it being just a word in their normal vocabulary.

It’s funny to think I’m picking a hill, just by pointing out an observation. It seems like hyperbole to say my comment was picking a hill to die on.

Fair point. I could/should have been clearer on that.

20+ years ago, a coworker from Memphis said "y'all" was singular, "all y'all" was plural. I wasn't going to honor that but it was interesting.

As a Texan...that person's assertion makes no sense. I have never heard anyone else ever claim that y'all should be used as a singular pronoun.

Do you mean you wouldn't only use y'all for singular? I assume you would say "how y'all doing" to one person or multiple people.

I've spent a lot of time in the US South (Georgia and Tennessee) and cannot say I heard people every using "y'all" in the singular.

Thou and Thee are nominative and objective cases. Same for You and Ye.

The formality/informality distinction is between You/Ye and Thou/Thee.

Plural 2nd person used to formally address a single individual came to English from French, thanks to the Norman Conquest.

French, I think, inherited it from Latin, and the custom of addressing the emperor with the plural.

After a while it became rude to address people with the informal 2nd person singular.

By the time of the King James Bible, iirc, English had already switched to universal "you", and "thou" was brought back in order to indicate where the source text had used a singular versus a plural.

"What is thy bidding, my master" is therefore foreshadowing of later insubordination.

In response, Prof. John Dyer recently created the "Y'all" version of the Bible: https://yallversion.com/

> "What is thy bidding, my master" is therefore foreshadowing of later insubordination.

It's more likely the usage of "thy" in this instance was meant to reflect the style and largely supplicatory diction of the Pater Noster (i.e. "thy Kingdom come\thy will be done...")

So, by analogy that most english speakers will understand:

Use "thou" where one would use "I" if discussing onesself. Use "thee" where one would use "me".

> because it supports second-person plural via "Y'all" exactly as mentioned in this article... "you guys" is, to some ears, sexist

Many people nowadays are happy to use "singular they" to refer to specific, definite individuals whose gender is not in question, and seem not to worry at all about creating ambiguity with the ordinary plural use of "they" (despite frequently doing so). So why would they care about being able to distinguish singular from plural in the second person, either?

It's usually very clear from context whether singular-gender-neutral they or plural-they is on use.

"you" is most frequently used in direct address, a context where it is frequently necessary to distinguish between addressing an individual in a group or the group as a whole

In Michigan, "you guys" is as gender neutral as a phrase can get. I think it's kind of funny, but it's completely true. (And frankly, I think most of the language policing stuff like this is just vastly overthinking things anyway, but that's just my opinion.)

That said, I got into a habit of saying "y'all" in high school anyways, mainly because it's fun to say.

> "Abandon hope all y'all (was: ye) who enter here!"

I'll be the HN troglodyte who loves to build from first principles:

Why not just "Abandon hope all who enter here?"

Does that leave humanity open to lawsuits from corvids or something?

Y'inz folks from Texas forgot about Pixburgh, n'at. We can second-person pluralize all day!

There's also "Yinz", these days mostly used in Pittsburgh (and even then mostly by older people). It is unfairly dismissed as "regional" in the article, but so are the others, really.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinz

I believe y'all is growing substantially in geographic prevalence over the past 10 years or so. Most people who are exposed to it for a little while tend to assimilate it into their own lexicon surprisingly quickly - the gap in English is really a vacuum that very much wants to be filled.

Personally, I desperately want a socially-adoptable singular vs. plural differentiation for "them".

Yep, it makes a perfect second-person plural —- my Latin teacher always made us conjugate verbs as “I, you, he/she/it, we, y’all, they”. And then constructions like “laudate, omnes” became “all y’all, SING!”

Y'all gives way to my favorite word, Y'all'd've (You all would have). It it fun to say and wraps up so many grammatical concepts into a neat package. Example usage "It's too bad Y'all didn't come to the party, Y'all'd've had fun"

I believe for me that’s Y’all’da - you all woulda.

"woulda" is just rewriting "would've" to match the speech pattern.

Keep working on this we’re getting really close to an American yodel.

The functional equivalent of yodeling is 'hollerin', which old timers in the mountains used to do every morning

I use something similar with y’all’re (= you all are).

Some people complain about the weird contractions that English can construct, but at some point, you just have to accept that that's the kind of language it's.

It's basically what agglutinative languages do, no?

y'all'd've: y=second person, all=plural, d=subjunctive, ve=posessive

Fun to see stuff like this pop up where it usually doesn't.

Never heard anyone pronounce the v in that one, it's always Y'all'd'a, as distinguished from y'all'odda (you all ought to). Similarly we have y'ontu? (do you want to?). Jeff Foxworthy has a bunch of these examples

I'm a very formal hick

Widjadidja?

Not to leave out Younta? (you want to?). I've never seen anyone try to punctuate that one though

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! Hooray for Texas!

I picked up "y'all" in English when I started studying Spanish. After using "plural you" constructions in Spanish I found myself wanting them when speaking English.

I hadn't considered y'all the English equivalent of vosotros, but this makes perfect sense.

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".

In Spanish it would be "Ustedes".

Spanish is a fun example of the euphemistic treadmill applying to pronouns. Usted comes from "vuestra merced" meanining "your (plural) mercy" but refers to a singular person. We can take that to mean that the second person plural "vosotros" already was a plural-meaning-formal-for-singular thing and then that wasn't enough and we got another word based on it. Fascinating!

jullie

Hooray for Texas!

"Y'all" didn't originate in Texas. Or, rather, nobody's really sure where it started, but it definitely isn't unique to Texas and more likely came from the Deep South.

Hey, I'm a foreigner, the nuances of American history and regional culture are lost on me. If y'all can call my country "Holland" even though that's like calling the US "Carolina", then I can refer to the entire American South by "Texas".

"Folks"

"Do you folks need more time?"

The problem with "people" is it sounds vaguely rude or hostile.

"Do you people need more time?"

if y'all is too "ethnic" for John McWhorter (I find this characterization disappointing compared to some of his other work) certainly "folks" is even more cultural appropriation

> The problem with "people" is it sounds vaguely rude or hostile.

That seems like a projection. Most people I know would be fine with it.

I don't know who you know, but most people I know would not be fine with it in every context. "You people" is widely considered pejorative, and any speaker who cares about communication should be aware of that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/EnglishLearning/comments/w0zx8e/why...

"You people" can have racists connotations inside the United States, so I wouldn't say that phrase casually when speaking to people in North America.

That's "you folks" which I suppose would be "y'olks". I'll stick with "y'all", thanks.

I also enjoy having a second-person plural in my lexicon. I took Latin in high school and often got a kick out of translating words in that case with a y'all.

My Latin teacher was particularly great and enjoyed it too, in moderation. She liked when our translations had just a little bit of personal style to them, and it really helped me appreciate the craft that goes into a good translation. It takes a bit of artfulness to translate a 2000 year old sentence, using all the same words, conveying all the same meaning, but make it feel natural and readable too.

To casually throw a wrench into your process, how do you deal with the fact that y'all is actually singular and all y'all is the plural form? I'm kidding. You're doing great.

The direct translation is 'you', surely you're not similarly confused when translating say a gendered 'the' or something? It's a lossy translation sure, but it is correct, you don't need regional dialect to be able to do it; depending on audience 'you' is in fact a much better translation.

"I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to you".

Maybe use yous/youse in other English speaking countries (England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa): https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yous (informal situations)

If you have a strong US accent or a drawl then perhaps stick with y'all.

Counter-proposal: Bring back "thou" as the second person singular pronoun and restore "you" to its rightful place as the second person plural pronoun.

As with so many of English's warts we can blame the French for the situation we're in. Vous in French is used when addressing a single person formally and conveys respect for the addressee. When class and station were more important following the Norman conquest of England, English speakers adopted the use of "you" to address a single person of higher status following the French custom. It's use became more widespread over time lest the speaker offend someone by using "thou" when the addressee thought that "you" was warranted.

As a practical matter, I use y'all. I think thou is a lovely word in its own right and is deserving of consideration.

N.b. IANALinguist, and IANAHistorian either. TINLinguisticA.

We thank thee, kindly.

Meh, might as well try to bring back the Segway. If it's not cool, it won't catch on.

I don't have enough linguistic background to understand the distinction, but I've also heard that using "will" for "intent to do something in the future" is somehow linguistically unusual because previously that job was used by "shall".

Sorry I can't give more details, I forget what the actual distinction between the two is. I just recall that it apparently creates difficulty when English speakers learn Romance languages that still have their equivalent of "shall".

Edit:

Apparently, the distinction can either be a lot more relevant or a lot less relevant than I thought depending on the context (e.g. legal text vs. everyday speech).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shall_and_will

It's interesting how much of language is invisible to a native speaker. If you had asked me, I would have said that most people never use "shall". However, now that the article points it out, I realize that native speakers use "Shall we <verb>" all the time.

"will" used to mean "to want", like its cognates in Dutch or German still do. However, it's not really unusual, it's quite common for desiderative forms of verbs to evolve into expressing a future tense, something similar happened independently in a few Indo-European language families, like Greek, Albanian, Celtic etc...

As a southern from the New Orleans area, ya'll is as natural a part of everyday language as it comes, and generally when it is heard by people who aren't from the south it comes off as smug, or cringe. Generally because they put a strong emphasis on the world, when it is rarely warranted.

It's like when people try to pronounce "New Orleans" as "nawlins" (to be clear, no one native says it this way, its tourist trap t-shirts that pronounce it this way), or some other such silly thing. Conversely there are many words that are said in unique ways in the region and part of being accepted as a transplant is people who learn to say those words with the regional dialect.

It may come as a shock, but I doubt anyone in the south (outside of the irish channel) really gives the New York Times opinion on southern language much of a second thought.

"but I doubt anyone in the south (outside of the irish channel) really gives the New York Times opinion on southern language much of a second thought."

Weird take. It's not like just because some portion of a Southern state is anti-elitist or whatever the state is devoid of New York Times readers. I grew up in a middle class setting in the South and every house I ever entered had a copy of The New Yorker. There are NPR stations all over the country. The South is not a mono-culture.

The new second person plural is "chat".

I can't decide if I'm making a joke or not by saying that.

it's not second person. it's not addressing anyone directly. it's addressing the audience in a specific context.

Maybe like 3 years ago, people I know will use it exactly like y'all. Just last night I was hanging out with some (late 20's, early 30's) friends and my buddy said, "Chat, what are we having for dinner" exactly how you would say "Hey y'all...". This has become really common amongst young millennials I know.

Love this.

Is it second person though? It feels like most of the times I've heard it in person, outside of a real livestream, it's sort of been for asking a question into the aether as emphasis.

"Chat, are you seeing this?" to emphasize something stupid they're seeing. It's not really spoken TO the person doing the stupid thing, it's spoken to this imaginary crowd to emphasize that what the other person is doing is obviously stupid.

I guess it sort of depends on who you imagine in the conversation. If it was actually directed at a real twitch stream chat, it would be second person. So not sure how to square that circle.

I could imagine saying "God, are you seeing this?" to playfully emphasize something sinful they're seeing. Or similarly "Hey FBI, did you know about this?" to playfully point out that something is (or seems) illegal. Or someone says "Mike Tyson isn't that great a fighter" and someone else pretends to look at someone behind them and go "Hey Mike, what do you think about that?". It's all kinda just pretending some other entity is watching these events for humor, and I think it's all just 2nd person.

Or you could say something like "Chat likes it when I rap", but that's similar to "God likes it when I genuflect after making a touchdown" or something -- it's just standard 3rd person with a flair.

People have a tendency to over-emphasize how unique new speech patterns are. This same thing happened with "literally" being English's first "auto-antonym" -- it wasn't really, it was just a slightly different form of sarcasm. "OMG I literally died! Like I'm genuinely dead now. None of you are hearing this because I'm totes a corpse. I'm completely serious you guys, I literally have no pulse anymore." -- I can imagine all of that being in the same vein, but it's hard to argue that that means "genuinely" and "totes" and "completely" are all auto-antonyms too. Or that "riiiiiight" is an auto-antonym because it actually means "wrong". Things just aren't that new in language.

Ahhhh yeah I see what you mean. I'm probably thinking a bit too literally about 2nd person vs 3rd person. My example is an imaginary side conversation, where "you" = "Chat", so it's 2nd person, but the intent to me "feels" third person when spoken, as chat/God/Mike etc would never refer to someone in the room. (not that it matters in the context of labeling something 1st/2nd/3rd person in this case though) That's what's messing me up I think. Sorry about that.

And your God example, yeah maybe this is not a new linguistic phenomenon haha. I can very much imagine some middle age priests taking a jab at one another with "God, are you seeing this?" as father Percival takes another swig from the hip flask.

It is definitely second person plural. I have heard my daughter use it (deliberately ironically) many times not in the form of questions, like "Chat, today we're going to be making toast."

I admit that I have never heard it used in anyway except as a noun of direct address, so it may not be a full-featured second person plural pronoun.

I've heard it referred to as a "fourth person pronoun" in that it also breaks the "fourth wall", and the excitement that English is the first language to invent a fourth person pronoun.

Though, I've also found Shakespearean scholars want to argue that while English did invent the fourth person pronoun, Shakespeare did it first with "Gentles" in several plays, most notably Puck's fourth wall break speech in Midsummer Night's Dream. (It is fun to give that speech with "Gentles" replaced as "Chat". To keep the rhythm you use the two syllable callout form of "Chat", which does exist in plenty of Twitch examples.)

"chat" is a fourth person pronoun, it's a hivemind pronoun.

...which works both as an extension of first/second/third person pronouns, and "breaking the fourth wall".

Previously "Y’all: the Most Inclusive of All Pronouns - The South’s default collective form of address is the best of the American vernacular."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/18/magazine/yall.html

I think the general theme here misses the mark. McWhorter obviously wants to talk about the interestingness of genderless, though seemingly gendered, pronouns in his essay. So much so that his dismissiveness of "y'all" seems too curt, and I think it's a mistake because the regionalness of "y'all" over "you guys" reinforces his narrative.

I also always raise an eyebrow when a linguist is pining for a universal familiar third-person plural, which is noticeably absent from Spanish as well: "vosotros" vs "ustedes." I suspect that the regionalness and third-person familiar pronouns might simply go hand in hand, as they are an in-group signaling mechanism, and it's a bit rare to have large groups who you are close with who aren't part of your region.

I grew up in Austin. I use "y'all" and "howdy" regularly, even more so than when I was young. That said, I feel like Texas Monthly "defending" the use of y'all as a potential universal term is entirely unnecessary. Again, there really isn't a need for a third-person familiar pronoun that isn't a natural one to use, because the point of third person familiar is that everyone in the space is comfortable with each other. The only reason why a formal version of this would ever be necessary is to have some sort of formal version of an informality... which makes little to no sense at all.

Embrace the informality of colloquial third-person familiar pronouns. Embrace "y'all," "yinz," "you guys," "youse guys," and all the rest, because whenever you're on the receiving end of the pronoun, it means you're with someone who is trying to be friendly.

Can't agree more. I imagine the scenario of waiting for a table at a restaurant. After 10 minutes I peek at the list and someone scratched my name from it.

I can say: "You removed from the list, yet here I am waiting" I bit curt. I can say: "Y'all removed from the list, yet here I am waiting" Friendly.

Well said.

re: aging into using y'all:

when you're young, you have a stronger need to impress people at work or personal life or wherever. and often that means shedding regionalisms or any little quirks that might give anybody an opportunity to judge as less-than in any way.

once you're older and more established you've built up enough social capital that you can "afford" to express yourself in whichever way you want.

in some situations, those little affectation that may have been judged negatively when you were young can actually become boons if you're seen as playing 'against the type' for whichever stereotype it is

I have noticed a large uptick in usage of y'all in the PNW in the last 7 years.

I personally think at this point y'all doesn't need to be defended, it is on it's way to winning regardless of what NYT Opinion pieces think.

Although reading the original NYT Opinion piece I do also agree with the premise that "you guys" has largely been drained of it's masculinity.

Y'all forever. One of the few southern mannerisms I intentionally don't drop as a lapsed southerner in California.

As an aside, I find it strange how many aspects of "the south" are labeled as "Texan" outside the south. I lived and visited all over the Deep South and y'all was standard vernacular pretty much everywhere. I'm not saying Texans don't say y'all, but they definitely don't have any unique claim to using it as second-person plural.

As a native Texan myself, "y'all" is one I've always hated, from my earliest youth. It just seemed excessively hokey and hayseed.

I unapologetically, unironically use "howdy", "a piece", "a ways", "over yonder", "get to goin'", and "fixin' to". But "y'all" is a bridge too far.

That's so fascinating to me! "Howdy" definitely ranks higher on my hokey-ness scale than "y'all".

Love a good "over yonder" though.

I grew up mostly in the north and talk very northernly, but somehow the only exception is that 'howdy' became my standard greeting. 'yall' feels like too much, but 'howdy' just rolls off the tongue so smoothly. Other greetings always sound too terse (hi, hey), too formal (hello), or are questions (how's it going, what's up) which I just loathe. Though technically howdy is sort of a question too, coming from 'how do you do'.

What's 'a piece'? Don't think I've heard that one.

"A piece" is a measure of distance, longer than "over yonder", shorter than "a ways".

"She lives up the road a piece."

In the midwest (originally from Chicago suburbs), I have the same sense from "y'all". I use "you all" often enough, but never shorten it to "y'all".

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.

I was a West Coast kid with absolutely no connection to the South when I added "y'all" to my idiolect as a teenager: I thought it just made more sense.

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?"

Y'all is the American informal second-person plural pronoun

Spanish: "ustedes" (formal) and "vosotros" (informal in Spain) or "vos" in some regions

French: "vous" is the standard, but informally there's "vous autres" in Quebec French

Portuguese: "vocês" formally, but "cês" informally in Brazilian Portuguese

German: While "ihr" is standard, some dialects use "ihr alle" or regional variants

Italian: "voi" is standard, but some southern dialects use "vujatri" or similar variants

Greek: "εσείς" (eseis) formally, but informally "εσείς όλοι" (eseis oli)

Russian: "вы" (vy) is standard, but "вы все" (vy vse) is used for emphasis

Arabic: "أنتم" (antum) is standard, with "إنتو" (intu) in dialects

I am most fascinated by Y'alls', a double possessive or possessive plural contraction which is common in Southern American English and AAVE (African American Vernacular English) which would otherwise be constructed more awkwardly in common American English as "all of your" or "your all's."

In both the Midwest and the South, I often hear "you guys'" (pronounced "you guyses").

I'm enjoying you guyses thread.

Isn't that a possessive form? As in:

Waiter: "Can I get you guys's orders?"

Non-standard (as written: "you guys' "), but speakers notoriously add extraneous " 's"s.

(Sidenote: when we were teenagers my sister and I referred to one pastor as "the polytheist", because he always said "in Jesus's name", which we chose to interpret as "in Jesuses' name". God, I'm a nerd.)

Vous is also the polite singular second person pronoun in French so they are part way to losing the singular.

I did not know the abbreviation "AAVE" but its always struck me as odd how much a shared language has split along racial lines. I wonder whether there are similar things elsewhere. Obviously where people speak English as a second language and speak different first language they might speak it a bit differently, as might (recent) immigrant communities, but those are both very different.

As a child of Appalachia, I suggest that we all compromise on you'ens, or as it's commonly pronounced yinz.

sometimes a T is included - yintz

Half my family says yinz, half my family says you’uns. They’re both correct as far as I’m concerned.

Since it's short for "you ones", I suppose it would technically be "you'nes", which of course looks insane and nobody would ever write it that way. I've also seen it written with an apostrophe ("y'inz") which is funny to me - it acknowledges the contraction, but with everything completely misplaced.

(and yes, I am from western PA)

> A New York Times columnist says it’s “much too slangy, regional or what you might even call ethnic to ever gain universal acceptance.” We couldn’t disagree more.

NYT columnist is the definition of “yankee with a stick up their ass.” It’s possible to agree with them on politics and recognize they’re wet blankets.

"Y'all" is a highly intelligent contribution to the English language, which underscores the folly of having deprecated "thou". English has plurals engrained in its DNA; it resists changes that make it a plural-free language.

Only a few words lack plural expression, like the words fish and sheep, or words that are inherently plural like pants, scissors or people.

Since thou has become severely archaic, invoked only in religious contexts or ironic contexts parodying religious speech, you has become a plural-free word like fish.

And that don't sit well with them Texans and other such folk.

I still don't understand why some Hollywood writers are so out of touch with reality that they create characters with horrible fake Southern accents saying "y'all" as a singular pronoun. Nobody would actually do that unless they have brain damage.

The only place I see people saying y'all can be singular is nonsoutherners on the internet erroneously trying to explain why people say all y'all. I've never seen that in Hollywood even you got any examples?

Yes! I commented elsewhere on the same thing. I would love to know how and where that started. It seems to be "one of those things that everybody knows" that has never actually been true.

Y'all is Texas' gift to inclusivity. When I joined a dev team that wasn't just guys, I worked hard to get away from saying "you guys", not because someone said I needed to, but because I felt that I needed to. Y'all worked because I came from Texas and its inclusive of everyone on the team. It has been my personal policy to use that in leu of "you guys" in all situations since then.

Y'all is a feature of general Southern vernacular and has nothing to do with Texas other than most of the settlers of Tejas were from the South.

Also saying things are a feature of Texas is a feature of Texas.

I like "Hi Team". I do use that in certain social circles, but I do get the point of the article.

Survivor, the US TV show, used to say "Come on in guys" until recently where they made a point to discuss the topic on camera with the contestants. There was a variety of opinions, but they ultimately settled on "Come on in." which conveys the point in a neutral tone.

"Team" makes sense when addressing... well, your team, like if you're in a huddle of basketball players. But there are many contexts where it doesn't make sense as a general purpose second person plural.

Cowabunga rolls more naturally off of my Southern California lips but I've been appropriating y'all in emails, etc. for years, and nobody has complained yet. But I still feel strangely compelled to write "Dear Sirs" at the top of letters to strangers, as there's no formal form of y'all. I usually settle for "Hello".

> But I still feel strangely compelled to write "Dear Sirs" at the top of letters to strangers, as there's no formal form of y'all.

Be the change you want to see, and start with "Dear Y'all."

Canadian here using y'all every day. Might as well make it the formal English plural.

Australian: I've used it in every social context at least once by now and I'd say it's distinctly stayed in the rotation.

Funny, the only time I ever got made fun of as a southern kid using y'all was when visiting Toronto suburbs (back in the 1990s).

As a New Englander, I am quite partial to "y'all" and "you all", mostly in written form. It is indeed a quite capable substitute to "you guys". But to my ear, "yall" is ever so slightly more informal than "you all", and so sometimes it doesn't feel exactly right.

Only a true Texan can tell you the difference between "y'all" and "all y'all".

"y'all'd've"

<insert scream GIF here>

still, brilliant nonetheless.

om'n'a go to the store soon!

I think it would be, fixin' to go to the store.

There is no x in "fi'n to".

"y'all'dn't've"

Or a Georgian.

I believe the Georgian version is different. “Y’all” is singular while “all y’all” is plural.

From North Carolina originally. "Y'all" is singular, "all y'all" is plural, and "all y'all MF'ers" is when you are angry and it could be singular or plural depending on the connotation.

You must have moved before you started speaking. But nice to see people in the thread recognizing it's not just Texas

Y'all is plural. All y'all is short for all of y'all.

Georgian here. No. "Y'all" has never been singular.

Some sets have a canonical partition. If you're referring to a set of birds or a set of fish, then the correct usage is y'all because those sets canonically partition into themselves.

But if you're referring to a set of birds and fish together, then the usage is "all y'all" because the canonical partition yields more than one subset (one containing birds, and one containing fish). The distinction helps differentiate between whether you mean the superset or one of those subsets.

It works with any other partition which might be obvious (not just birds and fish). If you have two families together, you might avoid "see y'all later" because it could be interpreted that you only expect to see one family later. "see all y'all later", by contrast is unabiguous--you mean both families.

---

Did I get it right? Am I a true Texan?

Having never given much thought to it, your analysis rings true to my native Texan ears.

There's another usage that comes to mind, though. One might argue that "y'all" borders on a second person plural inclusive of the speaker whereas "all y'all" marks a distinction between the speaker and the others. For instance, a peeved person would be more likely to say, "All y'all can kiss my ass," as opposed to, "Y'all can kiss my ass." "Y'all" by itself is more friendly and self-inclusive than "all y'all", which carries an inherent otherness to it.

Hmm, interesting. I'm not from Texas but I have family who is. I'll listen for this one also.

I'm under the impression that the double negative is a relatively modern thing (early 1800's). Previously, repetition of the negative just reinforced it, like:

> I ain't never put syrup on my bacon on purpose

...just double-enphasized the negative, rather than letting the second negative negate the first. This feels similar except instead of stacking negations you're stacking separations.

> One might argue that "y'all" borders on a second person plural inclusive of the speaker

So a first person plural?

I knew I explained that poorly. What I mean is that, in comparing "y'all" to "all y'all", a simple "y'all" is "you guys (and maybe me)" while "all y'all" is "you guys and not me".

Grammatical constructs can have a lot of variation between languages, and there are certainly nuances that can't be expressed in English the same way that it can be in other languages. One thing we lack is a nuanced sense of past, while other languages have baked in ways to express recent past or distant past (e.g. Bantu languages).

My proposed interpretation regarding "all y'all" is not academic, just a native feel, and I'm sure other native speakers could disagree.

It means everyone with no exceptions.

Y’all can kiss my ass; ladies and polite company excluded of course.

All y’all can kiss my ass.

It means "everyone with no exceptions".

All y'all need to come to my BBQ tomorrow. I can't eat 50 pounds of brisket by myself.

This is the correct interpretation.

"all y'all" is an abomination.

Using numbers to ab6te words is an abomination. All y'all is fine.

I’m not American and I totally agree. Y’all and all y’all are brilliant!

"All y'all" is improper Texan primarily used in as a public declaration to convince those present who are NOT Texan, to use the proper expression "y'all" (rather than, say, "all of you", "everyone" or "you" (plural)).

Or Dr. Dre.

As a non-Texan, I can usually tell the difference, since "all y'all" is generally followed by "muthafuckers".

Or preceded by the word "fuck".

I think that usage is common outside of Texas. A friend from Memphis uses it.

Big fan of y'all and it's variations. Primarily for it's ability to compress words with no ambiguity.

For example:

you + all = y'all

are + not = aren't

y'all + aren't = y'aint

Now that's a beautiful thing.

y'all'd've

It's indeed useful to distinguish singular you from plural you, which is something that most other languages do.

As a non native speaker, I'm sometimes confused and wish to see a distinction between between singular and plural they (they-all?)

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

They can refer to a single person.

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

You might just not notice it.

Oh, I know singular they is used/exists. I'm only pointing out that there is more precise language available most of the time, should it be needed - either she/he or adding details elsewhere in the conversation.

They also refers to the abstract "one."

As an ex new englander I approve of y’all over youse because it’s hard to use “youse” efficiently without saying “youse guys”.

What about "youse mugs"?

Yep, just "youse" by itself feels like an intentional regional quirk.

"What do youse want to do?" <= you're from the NY/Phila/I-95 axis

"What do youse guys want to do?" <= you've some exposure to American dialects

"What do y'all want to do?" <= you're an American or playing one in a movie

Midwesterner here - I use y'all all the time and nobody says anything about it. I live in an area where "yunz" is more popular (not quite yins) and I just hate the sound of that word. So y'all it is!

I’m a Pittsburgher who moved to Indianapolis when I was 7. I remember encountering the word y’all and thinking, “oh they just mean yinz.” I wonder if someone came from an area where neither are common, if the first encounter is more jarring?

Florence y'all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence%2C_Kentucky#Arts_and_...

Incredible. I've driven by it many times and have never learned the origin story:

> Built in 1974, the tower originally advertised the up-and-coming Florence Mall, as part of an agreement with the mall developers who donated the land for the tower. But because the mall was not built yet, the tower violated highway regulations, and the city was forced to change it within a short deadline. Rather than repaint the entire tower, they simply painted over the two vertical lines of the "M" to create a "Y". The intent was to change it back when the mall was built, but the local residents liked the tower's new proclamation, so the city decided to leave it as it was.

The water tower has its own Wikipedia page [0], which includes a photo of it before the "alteration" too.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Y%27all_Water_Tower

When I learned German, I started using “y’all” in English because I got used to using a plural you. I’ve never lived anywhere near the south, but once you start using it, it feels weird not to.

I actually started using the term y’all after I learned French. One you’re introduced to the concept of ‘vous’ you realize how weird it is that English doesn’t have a standard equivalent.

If I'm recalling The History of English podcast correctly, "you" was originally the plural/formal 2nd person pronoun, while "thou" was singular.

Eventually language did its thing and the default shifted. Now we think of "thou" as old timey and formal!

We need to bring 'thou' back! Don't thou agree?

I grew up in Texas and lived in Ohio for a year during middle school. So of course I said y'all. I'll tell you what - kids that age will laser in on anything to cast someone as an outsider, and for me that year it was that word.

Soon after moving back to Texas I regained confidence in saying the word. I think these days the only people that draw any attention to the word are non americans, so maybe it's proliferated a bit more in the last 2 decades.

"Y'all" has been common for a while among Anglo-Indians in South India. I was quite surprised when I first went online among the predominantly American early-Internet community and discovered that y'all consider it a peculiarity of the American South. I've always liked it, though I don't use it anymore now that I live in the US (where it is a marker of the South).

The resurgence of y'all as popular non-southern vernacular stems from White liberal terminally online users? Correct?

Yes. A non-Southern speaker who uses "y'all," especially in the typed or written word, is a strong liberal/progressive shibboleth. That so few comments have remarked on this so far indicates the leanings of the HN comment section, a product of many years of flagging and downvoting other viewpoints.

On a related note, some languages distinguish between "we including you" and "we excluding you". I wonder why it's not a thing in European languages. Seems like a pretty important distinction in certain cases :)

Y'all is efficient. It is just one syllable. Asking the question, "Y'all eat?" Is twice as fast compared to, "Did you all eat?"

Of course, I use it because I'm from the south eastern US, not because it's fast.

And to me this just raises the question I often ask myself: whether I'm the only person born in the US in the past fifty years who continues to use the perfect tense and distinguish semantically between it and the simple past.

I say "did you eat?" when I want to know whether you ate at a specific, single point in time in the past (and you and I both know which one I mean) -- and you no longer have the opportunity or that time has passed.

I say "Have you eaten?" When I want to know whether you've eaten anything yet. You may still have the opportunity. I may even be suggesting that we eat together.

My partner regularly asks me things like, "did we watch that movie?" and for a split second I will have no idea what the devil she's talking about. Am I supposed to know the exact point in time that she's referring to? Is there a reason why to opportunity to watch it has, implicitly, passed?

No, we just don't speak the same language.

"Did you do the laundry?" Had we scheduled it? Has the opportunity to do laundry passed?

"Did you make coffee?" No, and rejoice, my love, as the time of making coffee is still upon us.

"Did you eat lunch yet?" ...excuse me? Are you a five-dimensional being?

I don’t think anyone in the past used spoken language with the precision you’re describing.

English isn’t a programming language.

All of the questions you’re asked are abstractions of a different question or a series of questions.

Many of them have multiple meanings and you pick the most likely set based on context.

I was being a bit tongue in cheek, and my partner does tell me she has never met anyone more literal or rigid. So I take your point -- and it's fair.

That being said, many in the UK do use the simple past and perfect exactly as I've described. Using the simple past where the perfect is expected is, to their ears, unmistakably incorrect, whereas plenty of native speakers in the US draw no distinction whatsoever.

In rural Ontario and some other regions there's also "y'ouse".

Fuck the y'all haters, I used it even when in the northeast; now that I live in the south (not Texas) with my very southern wife, there's no chance of extirpating it from my vocabulary.

You can even get stickers from Dirty Coast that say "He/Him/She/Her/They/Them/Y'All/Cher". It's part of the vernacular here.

When British people start using "y'all" casually, as I suspect may start happening soon if it hasn't already happened, it's time to accept it as a part of the living English language.

Anyone enjoying this thread might like the "A Way with Words" podcast.

https://www.waywordradio.org/

I like seeing how far I can stack contractions, a purpose for which y'all is well suited. Eg "You all would not have" becomes y'all'dn't've.

I see this endlessly repeated across the Internet, but it doesn't work. -n't is not a general-purpose clitic the way -'d and -'ve are; it can't attach to arbitrary words. ("Well, Mary'd _said_ she was gonna, and the rest of 'em've all gone home.")

Yes, there are portions of the internet which gleefully misuse it on everything, and sometimes I am part of those portions; but even there, a) it's marked speech, and b) you wouldn't say *Y'all'dn't've gone, you'd say ?Y'all'd've gonen't, and only partially because it's funnier.

In New Zealand vernacular, "youse" (or "yous") is the more common variant, and like "y'all" it is looked down on as being regional or a signifier of lower class. I disagree, English really needs a second-person plural pronoun, and I spent some time deliberately using it in speaking and writing hoping it would catch on. There are dozens of us! Dozens!

As a native Southerner, I was amused, and pleased, when I moved to Singapore and heard Singaporeans using "y'all" in everyday speech. :)

The part about 'you guys' resonates. I teach an introductory coding class and found myself saying 'you guys' to a mixed-gender group and it didn't feel right. Especially given that there were a smaller number of women in the group. I was wondering to myself if such language might make women feel excluded or stigmatized somehow depending on the context.

As a lifelong southerner I find it mildly irritating when folks appropriate y'all. Y'all ain't from around here.

Imitation is the sincerest form of cultural appropriation.

See also: Y’all, You’uns, Yinz, Youse: How Regional Dialects Are Fixing Standard English [0]

0. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/yall-youuns-yinz-youse...

https://archive.is/88ING

Let's not forget the second person negative and the wonderful contraction of "you all are not".

y'aint.

I'm a little miffed that anyone would object to "y'all" or that anyone would take the objection seriously enough to feel the need to defend its use. Another Texanism comes to mind in response, the one that ends in "and the horse they rode in on".

I live in Maine, one of the most northy north U.S. states, and I now use y'all all the time. It's totally fit for purpose.

Edit: In fact I use it so often at work that my very prim-and-proper British colleague now uses it often and unironically, which is kinda hilarious.

I’m from Maine and say it all the time as well :)

I use y'all exclusively online.

It's a bit too jarring for conversation aloud here in the northeast.

Texas Monthly defending "y'all" is an absolute peak Texas Monthly moment.

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.

This is amusing. So… if one plans to publish their baroque opinions on English grammar… one should really know that conversational “y’all” is prescriptively a high status marker in the academy.

I picked up the habit in Massachusetts, in the mid 2000s, from an Ivy League humanities professor who also expressed support for a student debt strike. He used it very deliberately, in an effort to un-train our public school–addled brains from the inanity that we were somehow smarter than others for having fewer words in hand. In my bones, the thought of not using it as appropriate feels uneducated.

Using “y’all” in conversation shows incredible confidence, a way to flex command of formal language in an informal setting. It’s often used with emphasis. It leverages the listener’s discomfort, saying: I know precisely which register I’m speaking in. It’s an “elite” thing to do.

What you’ll never hear is one of these people using “y’all” as a formal address— especially as a singular, as in the rote “Y’all been served?” for a dining party of any number. There are a number of reasons for that, but number one is simple: It’s a high status signal.

Edit to add: Maybe importantly, this doesn’t extend to the casual use of “all y’all” . I think the colloquial academic equivalent would be “you [emphasized pause] all”. If you weren’t familiar you’d probably transcribe it as “you all”, but it’s closer to “you, all”. Looking at it now, I think that’s “intentional abuse” of the formal variant for intensifying, with just enough stress to make it visibly intentional?

But I should be clear I haven’t studied this dialect at all, I just learned to speak it :)

grammatical number, singular, plural

1st person, ME, US

2nd person, YOU, Y'ALL

3rd person, HE/SHE/THEY, THEY

In spanish we have the distinction naturally: USTED, USTEDES

Another example of genuine language tools dismissed as "Incorrect" is African American Vernacular English's "you be", "he be" tense. I don't know the exact distinction, Steven Pinker explains it well.

On that note, "that there rooster" is perfecty valid English as well.

I spent the first half of my childhood in Massachusetts and the second half in North Carolina.

I say y'all all the time. Truly an excellent word.

Y'all has been here to stay in the mainstream for a good long while. It really needs no defending. Bless your heart

It's hard for me to imagine not saying y'all because the NYT said to. It's a great word, get over it.

Thanks all y’all for y’all. I’m taking y’all. I love y’all. Because “y’all” is the best, most inclusive second-person, plural pronoun in the English-speaking world. Thank you, the South. What an ally.

— Hannah Gadsby, Douglas

From the NYT article:

>Some have even suggested “y’all,” a word that reads as much too slangy, regional or what you might even call ethnic to ever gain universal acceptance.

Heaven forbid we embrace something that could be called "ethnic"! Something something must secure a future for our linguistic monoculture.

I wonder if this writer would've written the same thing, but with "bruh" or "fam" swapped in:

>Some have even suggested “bruh,” a word that reads as much too slangy, regional or what you might even call ethnic to ever gain universal acceptance.

Probably not, as that would've been immediately recognized as racist (because "bruh" is ethnic, despite its recent widespread adoption, in the sense that its roots are in black-culture slang – just like how "y'all" is ethnic, despite its recent widespread adoption, in the sense that its roots are in southern-culture slang).

I dunno why the NYT author feels the need to find ways to be linguistically xenophobic.

I've long used "y'all" as a gender-neutral way of addressing a group, but now that's gone all mainstream I've been considering switching to "yinz".

yinz needs worsh. it'll cool y'off.

"y'all" a particularly popular term in NYC (I use it frequently and have lived in NYC most of my life) - so it's kinda bizarre to see "texas monthly" responding to "new york times" as if there is any cultural conflict beyond some random linguist's op-ed.

there was a heatmap published in the past (seemingly only saved by paywalled news organizations) that showed the prevalence of "y'all" in different areas.

I have political/social beliefs I believe are ethically right. It's tempting for me to think that people who agree with me, agree with me because my beliefs are right. But ultimately I think peoples beliefs (including my own!) are often a result of social inertia--I believe what the people around me believe--than any sort of logical reasoning process.

Case in point: the NYT and its NYC-based journalists often[1] share political views with me, because we're both from major Northeastern cities. It's tempting for me to assume that the NYT is thinking reasonably, but then stuff like this comes up and...

"Y'all" is just clearly a simple, elegant solution to a linguistic problem. I don't have strong feelings against "yinz" or "youse" except to say that even though I'm from an area where people say "youse", I think both these are harder to say. But "y'all" is clearly better than "you guys".

Dismissing a linguistic solution as "slangy", "regional", or "ethnic", is frankly, idiotic, and I think it comes from one of the uglier parts of Northeastern big city thinking (and yes, this applies to West coast big cities too). The places city folks dismiss as "flyover states" have a lot of smart people in them with good ideas. Yes, people in these places are often limited by a lack of education--a problem for which coastal cities are in part to blame. But a lot of good ideas don't require a lot of prerequisite education, and "y'all" is one of them. It's not "smart" or "educated" to dismiss "y'all", it's bigoted.

I'm not from a place that says "y'all", and "y'all" is one of the first things I adopted when I moved to the south. John McWhorter should be embarrassed.

[1] Less often in recent years.

omae-tachi

You can’t spell Y’all Qaeda without Y’all.

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