Resistance Is Futile, Y’all
Photo by Slippin Southern via Flickr (CC 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/dseF7q
The world has discovered “y’all,” and they like what they hear. So, all y’alls now want in on what some of us have been doing all along.
From the BBC…that’s the British Broadcasting Company for y’all that don’t know:
What do y’all think of when you hear the term ‘y’all’?
Perhaps the twangy accent of the Southern United States? You wouldn’t be wrong – the term, a contraction of ‘you all’, is a ubiquitous part of Southern speech that extends across demographic lines. For many people, it has a certain down-home, hospitable friendliness that sounds specific to the South
In other regions of the US, ‘y’all’ has historically been far less common. Yet, in the past couple years, ‘y’all’ seems to have exploded in use, including and especially among people who live far outside the South, in places north of the Mason-Dixon Line in the US, like New York City, and even overseas.
Australian Twitter users, many of whom have started saying ‘y’all’, are being playfully chided for trying to masquerade as Americans. Forty-something CEOs in the US have traded ‘you guys’ for ‘y’all’ under the influence of their more progressive Gen Z colleagues. And LGBTQ+ advocacy groups encourage the ‘y’all means all’ mantra, arguing that the term is preferred because it includes people of all gender identities.
‘Y’all’ is fun and useful – but the way the term has gradually slipped into conversation in other English-speaking regions and countries tells us a lot about how and why certain bits of language catch on. The more widespread use of y’all also signals a shift towards more careful use of language to be more inclusive, including within the workplace.
Or, it’s just easier to say, checks a lot of boxes, and makes life easier. The common vernacular is just that: everyday speech that changes from place to place and has a million different threads as to how it comes about. The social media age and information revolution of worldwide connectivity has changed folks’ perception of such things, and allows more people to be more exposed to different ways of doing things.
That’s a good thing.
The one thing to take note of is the folks who think they are discovering something new here, when really it has existed for hundreds of years if not longer. Linguistic changes, like cultural changes, occur best from the ground up, not the top down, and the spread of y’all could be a great example of that in a world that seems to ping pong among constantly changing poles of what are/aren’t acceptable terms. The fact that the contraction has popped up organically in several different cultural and linguistic traditions shows versatility and ease of use that make it approachable.
What “y’all” doesn’t need is for some of y’all to try and hijack it into some pseudo-intellectual academic exercise full of really big words when a contraction of two small words compressed into 4 letters covers the meaning just fine for all of us in the great unwashed massed.
We fully get what “y’all” means, and y’all don’t need to try to explain it after the fact just ‘cause you found out about it. Instead, how about all y’all new to “y’all” just say “thank you”, use the term with a smile and nod, and go about your business making the world a better place? We already knew “y’all means all” long before y’all thought you needed to explain it to us. Y’all are welcome to join in. Just don’t think you invented it. Such ingratitude and failure to acknowledge the source would fall under another term of contention, a no-no usually frowned on by the same set of folks now suddenly championing y’all to use “y’all.”
What was the term for that, again?
The lack of distinct second-person pronouns for the singular and the plural has been a problem. Y’all is as good a solution as any, though northeasterners might prefer “youse” and I’m not even going to try to spell the seemingly unique Pittsburgh solution.Report
On a related note, this is one reason why singular they is terrible. Every time I see it I have to go back and make sure I didn’t miss an additional person that had been introduced as a referent.
Apologists say that it’s no different from “you” doubling as singular and plural, but that’s not a good thing. Lack of a distinctly plural second-person pronoun leads to ambiguity, which is why we keep evolving workarounds like y’all, all of you, you guys, alls y’all, yinz, and so forth.
And third-person pronouns are probably used in number-ambiguous contexts more often than second-person pronouns. It’s only a matter of time before people start saying th’all or something like that to clarify that the plural is intended.Report
The war against singular “they” is lost, and we may as well get used to it. While my own stylistic preferences are generally conservative and I usually avoid singular “they” when I have time to reflect and edit — usually by recasting the sentence entirely — it slips out in my casual speech all the time. Largely because the gender-neutral third-person “it” has never caught on as a proper reference to persons, people who don’t want to exclude half the population in sentences where the gender of the person referred to is irrelevant have, for centuries, used “they” when the mossbacks and fussbudgets have insisted that “he” is just plain correct, goddammit, for — well, reasons.
I have been seeing singular “they” used in more and more formal writing, even in books coming out of conservative publishing houses, and expect that it will become fully acceptable in formal writing in my lifetime, which isn’t much longer to run.
We all cling to our crotchets, though. For decades I have advocated “ain’t” as the proper first-person singular alternative to second-person “aren’t” and third-person “isn’t.” “Ain’t” = contracted form of “am I not,” relieving us of the illogical “aren’t I?” Unfortunately, “ain’t” hasn’t been cabined so logically, used where “isn’t” already functions perfectly well. And, so used, it scans better in much music and poetry. As Dylan might have said: It isn’t I, babe, no, no, no, it isn’t I, babe. It isn’t I for whom you look, babe.Report
That’s not the right video link. It should be the Tupac song that uses the tightest-constructed phrase in Southern grammar. (For those who don’t know, it refers to fishing.) Also, that Outkast song is really beautiful when anyone but Outkast does it.Report
I moved from Texas to New Jersey the summer of ’78 after two years of graduate school. I had to unlearn the slower — but generally unaccented — speech I had acquired. “Y’all” stayed in my vocabulary for years, though, because it’s useful.
It sounds like a joke, but after my second week as a TA in Austin, a small group of students stayed for minute. “We enjoy the section, and your accent is no problem, but could you speak a bit slower? We don’t listen quite that fast.”Report
It’s the second-person plural. Yeah, it’s useful.Report
“And then there’s you’ns, which is y’all plus three…”Report
Now that the world’s discovering southern English, I’m hoping “fixin’ tuh” will catch on so that my mother will finally stop bugging me about using it.Report