Y’all Spreading Beyond the South

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jesse Wisdom from Louisville, Kentucky.

Hey, Jesse, from Derby Town.

Oh, yeah.

What would you like to talk with us about?

So I went to New York City. It’s my very first vacation. I’m my own as an adult earlier this year. And I had been once before when I was about 12 or 13 years old, about 14 or 15 years ago. And when I went as a kid, I noticed, you know, I’m from the country. I have a country accent. So people noticed that when I was a kid, and nobody said things like y’all, and people would ask where you’re from, like, you know, your accent’s really heavy. But I went there this year, and I noticed when I was at a bar, the bartender said the word y’all, and I was just taken aback by it a little bit just because of the experience I had when I was a kid. And I said to her, like, y’all say y’all up here now? So I was just wondering how that got up to New York City from down here in the south.

That’s a great question. And do you think that perhaps she was reacting to your accent?

No, she said, how are y’all doing as we walked up to the bar?

How about that? Turns out that there was a paper published on this exact topic in 2000 in the Journal of English Linguistics, written by Jan Tillery, Guy Bailey at the UT San Antonio, and Tom Weichel at the Oklahoma State. And this paper points out that y’all has begun to leave the American South. And there’s a reason for this. And I’m going to explain this. It’s a little wonky, but I want you to bear with me.

So we’ve got a couple of pronouns that are identical in English. They’re you, Y-O-U. One of them is the second person plural. So you can say you, meaning a group of people. So you need to get on the bus, meaning a lot of people. And we can also say you need to get on the bus, meaning one person, right? The problem with this kind of confusion means that we’ve often sought another way to refer to multiple people in that direct address, right? So we sometimes will say you guys need to get on the bus. And throughout the American North and the American West, most people, not all of us, say you guys. But in the American South, what do we say? We say y’all or you all.

Now, the problem with you guys is it sounds gendered. And as the years have gone on, a lot of people say, well, I don’t want to say you guys because that sounds like it’s just referring to men or boys. And I know that a lot of people say you guys to refer to mixed groups of men and women. And sometimes you often, actually, you guys can refer to just groups of women. But I’d prefer to say something else. And they’re casting around, looking at the dialects of American English. What else can I say? They’re like, oh, I can just say y’all. And so y’all has popped up throughout the United States, outside of the American South. Not hugely common, but it does show up again and again in linguistic surveys, you know, in Boston and New York and Michigan and Chicago and California. So it is actually leaving the American South. And who knows what will be in another 20 or 30 years? Pretty cool, right?

Yeah, pretty cool. I had a theory about it, too. You know, with the rise, hip-hop and rap music is a lot more popular these days than it used to be. And a part of the AAVE is the word y’all, and that’s really prevalent in a lot of this music. It’s more popular these days, too.

I think that is a solid theory. No work that I know of has been done on that, but certainly hip-hop has spread a whole lot of other language into mainstream American English and outside of Black English, and I would not be surprised since AAVE or Black English it does have a lot of Southern American English features in it. I would not be surprised if it did bring y’all to the larger mainstream American English, too. I would not be surprised.

That’s a great theory.

Yeah.

So bottom line is it’s just so darn handy, right?

Yeah.

It solves the problem of you guys sounding gendered. It solves the problem of these two Y-O-U’s, these two U’s sounding alike and being some confusion about whether or not you meet an individual or a group of people. It solves some issues. And the other thing is, and this is mentioned in that paper that was published in the Journal of English Linguistics in 2000, is y’all seems to be losing some of the stigma that it used to have. People used to think of it as being uncouth or rustic. And now it doesn’t quite have that so much.

Well, that’s good for me because I just can’t seem to shake not using that word.

Oh, don’t shake it. Don’t shake it. Be yourself, man. Be proud. Be proud of that dialect. Jesse, I want to thank you for your call. Call us again sometime. We love these cross-cultural collisions and help them sort them out.

All right.

Yeah, no problem. I’m really glad you guys had me on the show.

Our pleasure. Take care.

Thanks, Jesse.

Go Cards.

All right.

Yeah, go Cards. Y’all have a good one.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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