Texas does not have a monopoly on y’all. Y’all is collective, both as a noun, and as ownership. Y’all is Southern for Comrade.
Comrade
W’all
I refuse to accept Texas’ claim on y’all. Its a word collectively owned by everyone south of the mason-dixon line and I will fight to the death over this.
Signed, floridaman
Everyone gets y’all. It fills the dumb gap in English where the plural of you is you. Now if we could only get a singular neutral 3rd for people that isn’t also the plural.
E: Or we could start pronouncing They singular like latchkey, for a thee sound. So we can get fun words like they’s (thees). It will also make English even more confusing for newbies. What’s not to love?
It’s also second person plural (or singular), second person is always ungendered.
First and second person, plural and singular are never gendered: I, you, we, you / y’all / all y’all. The only pronouns that are gendered are the third person singular: he / she / it. Third person plural (they) is also ungendered.
The most common form (at least where I’m from) of second person plural behind “you all (y’all)” is gendered: “you guys”. It’s used in an ungendered way increasingly commonly, but “guy” is still gendered to plenty of English speakers.
As someone who grew up in North Carolina, I agree. Texas might be the first thing some people think of when it comes to “southern” states, but it doesn’t get exclusive claim to the quirks of the whole region
…Am I not allowed to use “y’all”, north of the 49th parallel? Do we have to bring back “thou” so “you” can be plural again? Or is this part of the Quebecois plot to force everyone to parler en français donc nous pouvons utiliser “vous”? C’est bien, anyway, j’suppose.
Fun fact:
“Thou” and “you” were the same word.
The “th” sound used to have its own character in written English called the thorn. When typefaces came along, it was excluded and sometimes replaced with a “y.”
Also why “Ye” and “The” are the same.
“You” is also ungendered. There seems to be a common idea that English is missing a second person plural. We have one, it’s “you”. We just stopped using the second person singular. That’s what all those variations of “thee, thou, thy” etc were.
“Y’all” would be a superpluralization. If that’s still not enough we also have the ultraplural form of, “all y’all”
Y’all is exclusive. All y’all is inclusive.
If I walk into a party in a house and a group of my friends are there and I say ‘what are y’all doing here?’, I’m only talking to my friends.
If I walk into my own house and there’s a party there and I say ‘what are all y’all doing here?’ I’m addressing everyone of the hoodlums in my house.
We’re very inclusive in Australia also.
‘G’day you bunch of cunts’ means hello to everyone male, female, known and unknown.
We’re very polite over here.
How very nice of all you cunts over there
All Y’all cunts, we just talked about this.
Whoops. Thanks y’all
Getting pressed enough about a single downvote to make an edit is cringe.
Saying that things other people do are cringe is cringe.
Yeah. We mostly think of grammatical number as a simple choice of singular vs plural but that’s not what we do in real life.
We generally have multiple labels that describe the concept of progressively expanding circles of what’s included when we think of ourselves.
There’s the very narrow sense of I/me/myself. We have various expansions around us/all’y’all. Jamaicans have the phrase “I and I” which focuses on the individual but explicitly calls out the connection with others.
So then “All y’alls” (not all y’all’s) would be ultrasuperpluralization?
Sounds right.
Presumably “y’all’s” would be the second person superplural possessive.
All y’all’s “all y’all” for all and for y’all
In New England (the best England), we have “youse”.
We also have “Ya’” where we elide the entire ending and you need to determine plural vs singular from context. For example, “Ya’ can’t get thea, les’ ya been there befoa.”
That’s why conservatives have started to say yim’all and yer’all in order needlessly gender the expression. Can’t believe these folks sometimes.
Edit: 😂
Really? I’ve never heard that and I’m in Texas
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Literally never heard that and I live in texas
0% true. Also Texan, and not just any Texan, rural Texan until recently. This is nonsense
What state is this?
North Carolina
Also known as the best Carolina or at least the less awful one. Seriously though, fuck South Carolina.
I went to South Carolina once. For the eclipse a few years ago.
We flew into Charlotte, stayed there for a night, then Greenville SC for a night (to be in totality), and back to Charlotte for a couple of days.
Crossing the border from NC to SC was less like crossing state lines and more like crossing the DMZ or the Berlin Wall. Just…a totally different word on the other side of that line.
Best part was that I got to try out cheer wine. Also there was a guy in front of me at the concession stand (we saw the eclipse from the Greenville Zoo) on the phone with someone. He was trying to tell that person he was in the “food line” but the other person kept hearing “Food Lion”, the name of a local grocery chain.
Although a couple of different guys saw me sweating my ass off in the zoo and offered me a “cool rag”. I had no idea what that was and it sounded disgusting so I politely declined…but in retrospect I have to appreciate their hospitality.
Next eclipse, I’m going to Austin.
North Carolina once outlawed State officials mentioning or acknowledging climate change exists, to the detriment of their own coastal cities. We could also discuss bathrooms if you want. I think NC ought not be pointing fingers about who is better.
North Carolina is only the way it is because of ridiculous gerrymandering so perhaps we shouldn’t be negative and discouraging of people who want it to be better
Well I DID add “or at least the least awful one”. I know that NC is far from perfect, with some instances of truly horrid policies, but compared to SC it’s almost downright progressive lol
This is another reason I really should switch to Linux.
It’s the year of the Linux desktop, Y’all.
Y’all is the best pronoun.
It’s second person can be used singular or plural, and the difference is all contextual.
It’s ungendered and it’s makes almost anything feel “more fun.”
It’s actually a contraction from old English or Scots and has been around since 1631. The hicks are using socialist words that aren’t theirs.
*ain’t theirs
Y’all, it ain’t theirs
(The South had a significant surge of Scottish immigrants)
(They’re a fuckin “liberal” monarchy.)
Bless your heart
Thems fightin words.
For those of you who aren’t woke yet, I just made a fresh pot of coffee.
Hmmm, fresh pot ! Thanks, I’ll have two ounces
Use metric units! Damn gun monkey!
Y’all Texans can go to hell for trying to claim y’all.
- Signed a Louisianan
P.s. your El Paso 857 sign can go right to hell too.
Arkansasan here. That’s about right. God damned Texans.
All y’all Texans.
Y’all was created to serve a completely artificial problem.
English has second person singular pronouns, but for some dumbfuck reason we’ve deprecated them. It’s still maintained in the standard for compatibility with legacy literature but not recommended for new works. If thou talk’st this way, thy speech comes off as archaic/shakesperian/biblical. So we use the second person plural for everything. But this removes the ability to encode context on how many thou art addressing. “You! Go put that fire out.” Are you talking to an individual in a group or the whole group?
So the American south turned “you” into the singular form and invented “you all” contracted to “y’all” for the plural form.
Now we just need to fix the first person plural problem, ie “We’ve just won the lottery!” Does “we” include the listener, or not? English doesn’t encode that information; “we” don’t have different words for “myself the speaker and the listener(s) and perhaps others” and “Myself the speaker, others, but not the listener.”
M’y’all and m’y’ain’t
Ah, compound contractions. Yeah that’ll work. We’ve already got y’all’ve and y’all’d’a.
Can’t forget about y’all’dnt’ve.
y’all’dn’t’ve forgotten an apostrophe if y’all’d de-contractify it: “you all would not have”
The first person plural of we is we’uns.
heard many you-uns growing up around the south.
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Doesn’t matter if it was done intentionally or not.
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The onlie trans community uses y’all a lot. And howdy and haiii :3
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Trans people are normal too.
But are texans ?
sorry, by normal I meant people from non-LGBT groups 😭
y’all is second person plural. First and Second person aren’t gendered. Therefore, I is also woke
OMG yes! We must make this a thing, make the right speak in caveman to fit their troglodyte nature! Lol
I’m not even in America amd I use y’all. So it’s clearly not Texan.
I’m not even in the UK and I speak English.
