"y'all" is the proper English second-person plural pronoun

glennmagusharvey

*writes "y'all" on a large foam glove, of the sort seen amongst the audience at some sports games*

and if any of y'all disagree then y'all should, uh, TALK TO THE HAND or something

glennmagusharvey

okay, i actually do seriously believe that "y'all" is a good idea and not just a semi-negative cultural stereotype

Princess Alice

glennmagusharvey

CentralAvenue said:

the true form of Bakura

Crystal

I like it.

Tatterhood

CentralAvenue said:

good drag name imo

Imipolex G

yinz

Tre

'y'all' > 'you guys'

Corvina

I think "y'all" is spreading outside SAE + AAVE, but I don't have a study to cite.

Odradek

I seen yinz downtown at Dave and Busters.

Yinz wanna get some wings and then attend a Trump rally?

Corvina

Then there's "yous"/"youse"

Sredni Vashtar

Odradek said:

I seen yinz downtown at Dave and Busters.

Yinz wanna get some wings and then attend a Trump rally?

Usually I see it spelled "yins," because plurals end in "s" and that's what that word is doing, but being dialectal I guess there really is no standard per se.

Corvina said:

Then there's "yous"/"youse"

"Youse" is a curious thing. It's not necessarily plural and more often than not it indicates a particular case. Not sure how to describe it.

Corvina

Sredni Vashtar said:

Odradek said:

I seen yinz downtown at Dave and Busters.

Yinz wanna get some wings and then attend a Trump rally?

Usually I see it spelled "yins," because plurals end in "s" and that's what that word is doing, but being dialectal I guess there really is no standard per se.

Corvina said:

Then there's "yous"/"youse"

"Youse" is a curious thing. It's not necessarily plural and more often than not it indicates a particular case. Not sure how to describe it.

There are two forms that are "youse": the "Commonwealth" (for lack of a better word, given how Wiktionary defines its distribution) 2nd-person-plural "yous" and the AAVE 2nd-person-genitive "you'se"

Sredni Vashtar

Again, there's also singular "youse," which is sort of halfway between the two and is mainly a Northeast thing, particularly in old Italian communities (like the one in South Philly) for some reason. Even then, I think there's a grammatical gap being filled in how there's a difference in subject-object relationship between "you" or "ya" and "youse."

Corvina

Sredni Vashtar said:

Again, there's also singular "youse," which is sort of halfway between the two and is mainly a Northeast thing, particularly in old Italian communities (like the one in South Philly) for some reason. Even then, I think there's a grammatical gap being filled in how there's a difference in subject-object relationship between "you" or "ya" and "youse."

Interesting, I didn't know about that

Salix Babylonika

Y'all is the standard where I live.

Though it's pronounced more like yo'll.

Odradek

Y'all is the best english second person plural word.

All the others sound incorrect. Y'all is a contraction of you all

Imipolex G

Odradek said:

I seen yinz downtown at Dave and Busters.

Yinz wanna get some wings and then attend a Trump rally?

this kind of stuff is all I hear at work

I envy the dead

Sredni Vashtar

Odradek said:

Y'all is the best english second person plural word.

All the others sound incorrect. Y'all is a contraction of you all

I use it a lot partly because it's just more of a Pennsylvania/New Jersey thing than anywhere else outside of the South, and perhaps a little because I lived in the South at different points, but mostly it's because I went to a school where a third of the kids were black and at least half of them were from North Philly—best known as the birthing place of the expressions "jawn" and "salty," the latter technically pronounced "sawdy."

Sredni Vashtar

Seriously, I was in on the ground floor on "salty" and everybody and their mom uses it now and pronounces it wrong because you're a buncha fuckin' noobs.

Odradek

Do other anglophone countries have  different second person plural pronouns? Do Canada or Australia have any?

Salix Babylonika

Sredni Vashtar said:

Seriously, I was in on the ground floor on "salty" and everybody and their mom uses it now and pronounces it wrong because you're a buncha fuckin' noobs.

"Salty" and "salty ('sawdy')" are different words though.

MadassAlex

Odradek said:

Do other anglophone countries have  different second person plural pronouns? Do Canada or Australia have any?

Australia probably has several, but they are likely outside the ken of my Melbournian experience. 

Tatterhood

Odradek said:

Do other anglophone countries have  different second person plural pronouns? Do Canada or Australia have any?

I haven't heard one in any of the parts of Canada I've been to.

(Uh, in English that is, I heard all kinds of French pronounce in Montreal.)