The Dictionary of American Regional English traces you-uns, a plural form of you, to the Midlands and the Ohio River Valley. But the phrase goes back a while; even Chaucer used something similar. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “You-uns”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, my name is Alan Wood. I live in Addison, Texas.
Okay, well, what’s on your mind?
My mom grew up on a farm in North Carolina. She has quite a large family.
And I have one aunt in particular that used to use a phrase called ewins when she was referring to myself or my siblings or cousins.
And I never got an explanation for the word, but we just always kind of assumed that she met ew-youngins.
And then occasionally my aunt would actually even reduce it to yins.
So I was just wondering, is there any history behind that?
Did she make this up, or what do you know about it?
Well, you know, it’s funny.
This is a nice confluence of events, Alan, because I had something happen to me a couple weeks ago that got me really excited.
I got the fifth volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English, and you probably have heard us talk about this on the show before.
This is this massive work about the way we talk, America and about the dialects and the way that different regions differ from each other.
And so I immediately turned, I swear, I immediately turned to the section on this particular word and the words that are like it.
I looked at you all, yuns, yous, you guys, and yins.
And these are all ways that different parts of America refer to a group of people.
It’s the second person plural pronoun.
The history of these is a little indistinct, but we do know that there are uses very similar to this in Scots English, in Irish English.
And some uses can even be traced back as far as Chaucer’s time, where he’d say ye ones.
That’s Y-E-O-N-E-S.
And it’s kind of the same idea.
There has long been in English this desire, this instinctive desire, to find a way to distinguish the U singular and the U plural.
And so these kind of have come up naturally as a matter of course.
And U ones is pretty widespread across what’s called the Midlands in the United States.
That’s basically the Ohio River Valley as far east as Pennsylvania and as far west as Kansas, including a little bit of Missouri and a little bit of Illinois.
Well, I learned something. Thank you very much.
Well, cool, Alan. I’m glad we were able to help.
Well, thank you very much for having me, and have a great day.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
