Proudly use "y'all" frequently in my everyday conversation, despite having zero other attributes characteristically Southern about me. As the article says it's flexible, is impossible to offend anyone with as far as I can tell, and just sounds good.
I was a West Coast kid with absolutely no connection to the South when I added "y'all" to my idiolect as a teenager: I thought it just made more sense.
DC metro native here. I picked it up during college (UVA, in central VA, fair number of southerners on campus). Use it pretty regularly, mostly as part of a group greeting "how are y'all?"
From North Carolina originally. "Y'all" is singular, "all y'all" is plural, and "all y'all MF'ers" is when you are angry and it could be singular or plural depending on the connotation.
Some sets have a canonical partition. If you're referring to a set of birds or a set of fish, then the correct usage is y'all because those sets canonically partition into themselves.
But if you're referring to a set of birds and fish together, then the usage is "all y'all" because the canonical partition yields more than one subset (one containing birds, and one containing fish). The distinction helps differentiate between whether you mean the superset or one of those subsets.
It works with any other partition which might be obvious (not just birds and fish). If you have two families together, you might avoid "see y'all later" because it could be interpreted that you only expect to see one family later. "see all y'all later", by contrast is unabiguous--you mean both families.
Having never given much thought to it, your analysis rings true to my native Texan ears.
There's another usage that comes to mind, though. One might argue that "y'all" borders on a second person plural inclusive of the speaker whereas "all y'all" marks a distinction between the speaker and the others. For instance, a peeved person would be more likely to say, "All y'all can kiss my ass," as opposed to, "Y'all can kiss my ass." "Y'all" by itself is more friendly and self-inclusive than "all y'all", which carries an inherent otherness to it.
Hmm, interesting. I'm not from Texas but I have family who is. I'll listen for this one also.
I'm under the impression that the double negative is a relatively modern thing (early 1800's). Previously, repetition of the negative just reinforced it, like:
> I ain't never put syrup on my bacon on purpose
...just double-enphasized the negative, rather than letting the second negative negate the first. This feels similar except instead of stacking negations you're stacking separations.
I knew I explained that poorly. What I mean is that, in comparing "y'all" to "all y'all", a simple "y'all" is "you guys (and maybe me)" while "all y'all" is "you guys and not me".
Grammatical constructs can have a lot of variation between languages, and there are certainly nuances that can't be expressed in English the same way that it can be in other languages. One thing we lack is a nuanced sense of past, while other languages have baked in ways to express recent past or distant past (e.g. Bantu languages).
My proposed interpretation regarding "all y'all" is not academic, just a native feel, and I'm sure other native speakers could disagree.
"All y'all" is improper Texan primarily used in as a public declaration to convince those present who are NOT Texan, to use the proper expression "y'all" (rather than, say, "all of you", "everyone" or "you" (plural)).
Cowabunga rolls more naturally off of my Southern California lips but I've been appropriating y'all in emails, etc. for years, and nobody has complained yet. But I still feel strangely compelled to write "Dear Sirs" at the top of letters to strangers, as there's no formal form of y'all. I usually settle for "Hello".
Since it's short for "you ones", I suppose it would technically be "you'nes", which of course looks insane and nobody would ever write it that way. I've also seen it written with an apostrophe ("y'inz") which is funny to me - it acknowledges the contraction, but with everything completely misplaced.
I tease non-Texans that Texan English is actually superior to normal American English because it supports second-person plural via "Y'all" exactly as mentioned in this article... "you guys" is, to some ears, sexist, and "youse guys" (a New York-ism) is a little too old-school Italian.
English lost its second person plural when we switched from Thou (second person singular formal + Thee=second person singular informal) and Ye (second person plural) to just "You", but Texans rightly have solved the problem and kept the clarity. (The more-modern "Yo" is delightfully brief but as ambiguous as "you".)
Now... if you want to tease a Texan back about all this, you can ask them whether that implies the proper phrase for when you enter Texas then should be "Abandon hope all y'all (was: ye) who enter here!"
Which itself seems to be related to the word "guy" as in "guy wire" also related to "guide", "guidance", or "guidelines". Meaning to lead, direct, or conduct. To show the way.
I'd guess this depends on region/demographic, but at least in my circles on the west coast, "guys" is gendered when it's used to describe or identify people in the third person, but it's gender-neutral when used to address a group of people in the second person.
So "the guys" or "how many guys" always refers to men, but "you guys" carries no implication of gender at all. I often hear people address groups consisting entirely of women as "guys", and nobody bats an eye.
Also for reference, these are "compound nouns" - a single noun composed of multiple words. No one has these issues with "ice cream", for example, but "you guys" really is just another one of these.
I think it makes sense to say "you guys" is a compound noun, but the word "guys" can be used in this gender-neutral addressing-a-group sense outside of the phrase "you guys". For example: "Hey guys!", or "Guys, what should I eat for lunch?"
You can receive something a certain way that was not intended by a sender.
It's important to try to understand the intent of the sender. In this case, many cultures sending the message "you guys" don't internally view this as relating to gender.
You could try to change their culture because many people receive it wrong, or you could learn about the culture and try to change the receivers culture.
Sometimes you can't accept the differences because it's perpetuates too much harm.
Where to draw the line is an ongoing and difficult question.
This reminds me of when they tried to de-gender Spanish and the vast majority of native Latinos hated it, Google still refuses to back down on “Latinx”
Depends. Is there a difference between the phrase "Handprint4469 like fucking guys", and "Handprint4469 likes fucking you guys", pointing over to your mom and your sister?
thou is the singular intimate. (compare the tu- form, in french).
You could be singular or plural, but it was always formal. (compare the vous- form, in french)
Knowing this puts a whole new spin on things like the KJV, since as moderns we hear "thou" and think "fancy old timey speech! very formal!" and it is exactly the opposite.
Quakers/Friends chose the thou- form as the preferred form to address everyone; this was part of their scandalous behavior at the time, because it was heard as being entirely improper. (For their part, Quakers figure we're all equal before God, so why pay too much attention to social status? -- and that's not a bad point, really!)
I was taught Biblical Hebrew by an Australian scholar who learned hers in the south of the US, and I picked up from her the habit of translating the second plural as "y'all" :-) You can of course do the same with Greek. For some reason I preferred "y'all" to the more Australian "youse."
It's very much perceived as a vaguely "redneck" or "hoser" way of speaking here.
Another similar dialect isogloss-ish that often goes with that is dropping the past-tense "I saw" and replacing it with the past-participle "I seen". Or, alternatively, another way of putting it is that it's dropping the "have" in "I've seen"
Middle class parents and teachers definitely scolded kids for speaking this way when I was growing up. Was seen as lower class.
While I don't have a subscription to it (I haven't justified $50/year for that to myself) you will see that "youse" comes up with an "explore more" for Great Lakes, North Midland, and Northeast and "youse-all" shows up as Middle Atlantic.
We also say "youse" in Australia (or at least my region of Australia, it's definitely informal though)
Since moving overseas and studying other languages (Slavic and Baltic languages) I think it's definitely something needed in English. I think I still use youse, I never note it. It's just something that's so naturally useful it wouldn't occur to me that I'm saying something weird or forced.
I love "yin"! I have a few friends from western PA and love when they're around so I can use "yinz" freely. Neither of them really use it in day-to-day speech, it's more of a shibboleth of sorts (or whatever the term would be for "look at me, I'm from group X"). Whatever, it's a fun word.
When this happens the other people are implicit: for example "have y'all got Coke?" to a waiter at a restaurant, where "y'all" refers to all the people involved in the restaurant.
(The answer one does not want to hear, at least in Georgia, is "is Pepsi OK?")
There’s a lesser known ironic variation where y’all is sort of the opposite of the “royal we”, aka the majestic plural.
To take someone down a peg if they seem full of themselves, you can use the majestic singular satirically. As in: I just got a fancy new car! Gosh, did y’all get seat warmers with it too?
I grew up in the deepest of the deep South. Never did I ever hear "y'all" refer to a single person. I don't know where this trope originated. "Y'all" is definitely plural.
Seconded. In my entire North Carolina + Georgia upbringing, with frequent visits to Tennessee and back to NC, and some visits to South Carolina, Florida, and Alabama...never once have I heard y'all referring to a single person.
It's literally a contraction for "you all". That doesn't make sense for talking to one person.
This whole thread is extremely confusing to this Appalachian native. Y'all is used quite widely throughout the entire southeast. It's recognized, if not used, through the entire country. I've also seen its use increasing in the Midwest as it seeps out of the south.
Do many people actually see this as a novel word? It's incredibly common from my perspective here in Ohio.
an aggressively progressive set of new yorkers practically bullied me into using it a decade ago over concerns of sexism so at least when talking about people in those places in tech I can't say I share your experience. lots of coastal progressives say y'all nowadays. it's "inclusive"
I also hear people say "folks" when that is also borrowed from Southern US English
I say y'all because it has one less syllable than the other options while retaining clarity
Yeah in the PNW, I commonly hear the progressive/inclusive “y’all,” the AAVE “y’all,” and the southern transplant “y’all” - but personally I never use it unless doing it satirically.
I wasn’t raised to say it, and unfortunately I’ve got this lingering association with southern racist / ignorant hillbillies usage the term. “Y’all better get along now y’hear?” So it always feels weird coming out of my mouth.
Maybe surprising to hear white people saying it, but most black people (or people who grew up in predominantly black neighborhoods) throughout the US have been using it for a long time. I would assume that's a byproduct of The Great Migration.
I've lived in the northeast my whole life, and I don't remember ever being surprised at the idea of someone saying it. That's at least partially because I'm just used to the idea of people I interact with potentially not being from the northeast though. Even at a young age in the suburb I grew up in (with around 25k population, so not a particularly huge one), it was pretty common to encounter people who came from other states or countries. I guess if you're from a town small enough you might not be as used to interacting with people from other places, but is that really a regional thing or just a small town thing?
> Do many people actually see this as a novel word?
Where I live, yeah. I live in Minnesota and I intentionally use "y'all" here because I think it neatly fills the need and I want it to catch on, but it definitely feels like an affectation. It's not something you hear unless someone is from out of town or going out of their way to use it intentionally (like me).
in northeast urban areas, if someone uses y’all it means they are probably a left-wing/social justice oriented person. use is correlated with “folks”/“folx”. no idea why, maybe to replace gendered “you guys”. weird but true.
Yep, it also replaces "ladies and gentlemen" and is a more informal "people."
I've heard of the the mythical gender neutral guys but having spent my life in classes and a career field where being the only woman is the standard, the amount of times folks are like "good morning guys… and girl" or "good morning fellas… and lady" is just comical at this point. Clearly speakers aren't imaging a mixed group when they say it.
It's been the same for me in the midwest and northeast.
Maybe it's that they were intending to address a group, but then realised that what they said might cause offence so they corrected themselves.
I think it's not so much they imagined what they were saying before they said it, it's that they reached for the handy phrase for addressing a group without thinking, and then only afterwards realised it. At least that's what I would do.
I wonder what it would feel like if I joined a majority female class and was addressed as "good morning ladies, and man". I've never been in the situation unfortunately.
Another phrase would be good. I vote for youse all.
Except that northeast urban areas are famously rife with transplants from all over the country, including me, who uses "y'all" because y'all don't know what "yinz" means.
I'm from the midwest with family from the deep south. I've ported y'all to NYC, but it took some convincing to get folks to be comfortable with using it.
After moving away from Texas, y'all was the one obvious thing that would give me up. I don't have a Texas drawl unless I'm really tired or putting on airs. Howdy was another one, but used much less frequently.
Another word from Texas that drives me crazy is "heighth". I don't know why people add the h at the end when they say it, but nobody spells it that way.
I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone use "youse guys", but "youse" without "guys" is indeed a now-archaic New Yorkism. However, it doesn't have any particular connection to Italian-American New York other than the fact that "youse" was a native New York dialect formulation that US-born children of Italian immigrants, along with many other ethnic groups, adopted naturally. I understand that "youse" is prevalent in a number of dialects in Ireland and England and presumably spread to New York City through earlier waves of immigration from those places, assuming it wasn't independently re-invented. If I am remembering correctly, "youse" or "yiz" is used in dialogue in Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie:_A_Girl_of_the_Streets) which depicts late-19th-century Irish-American New York characters.
My sense (as a native New York person who grew up around an older generation many of whom naturally used "youse") is that use of "youse" may have been somewhat correlated with being a member of a European-descent pre-WW2-immigration-origin Catholic-identifying ethnic group (so, in particular, Irish, Italian, German), but I'm not even sure that's so.
By the time I was growing up, "youse" was a class and (maybe secondarily) ethnic marker, largely rejected by the Baby Boomers and later generations in favor of the more nationally standard "you guys". If the seemingly redundant "youse guys" occurs at all it must be an odd conglomeration of the older and newer usage.
"yous" (slightly different s sound) is also common among the rural older generations in German and Dutch immigrant areas. My grandma used it all the time, though not with the double plural "youse guys", just "yous"
As a native midwesterner, I get more annoyed and defensive than I should when people complain that “you guys” isnt gender neutral. Where I come from, everyone is “a guy”.
It can mean “male person”, but that’s only if you use it in specific contexts that brings up gender (like saying “guys and gals”).
I've still never heard, for example "this guy" when referring to eg a specific female coworker. I live in the midwest. "You guys" is frequently used as a genderless plural sure I guess but "guy" is not gender neutral.
Right, it's only the plural that's gender neutral. Kinda like how in Spanish "abeula" means "grandma", "abuelas" means "grandmas", and "abuelo" means "grandpa", but "abuelos" means "grandparents", not "grandpas". The masculine plural is gender inclusive in most contexts.
Ok but that's a different claim than the one I was originally replying to.
And anyway the masculine plural being genderless is a convention of romance languages, which english is not. It is not useful or consistent to describe expectations for english usage in terms of the features of other languages. Negative concord and invariant be are common language features globally but you don't hear white americans scrambling to include them in standard usage.
There are plenty of other situations in English where the masculine plural is gender inclusive (probably because so much of English is borrowed from romance languages). For example, "actors" can refer to both male and female actors, "actresses" cannot.
Identity politics has resulted in certain groups making concerted efforts to try to eliminate such usages, but it's still an ingrained part of our language.
"it" in this case referring to gender inclusive masculine plural nouns as a feature of the English language, not the particular use of "you guys" as one. That phrasing may well be new. Actually it seems like the phrase "you guys" is itself pretty new, see: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=you+guys&year_...
Context changed the use of language. If you know any foreign languages you know two words that are more or less the same carry a different meaning in context.
Because it's for group greetings and not addressing individuals. e.g. My female friend from Long Island uses it to address her friends in group settings but never has referred to her wife as "guy" and neither has anyone I ever knew growing up in NY.
I've been a grown adult for a long time and still use boyfriend/girlfriend. This obsession with absolute correctness is probably why we are so miserable all the time.
To me it's simple
1. Married -> Husband/Wife
2. Dating -> Girlfriend/Boyfriend
3. Middle Ground -> Fiance/fiancee
I've yet to see a case this doesn't cover so "partner" seems like a solution looking for a problem.
I wonder why you find the term "partner" insufferable? As a Midwesterner comfortable with "you guys," I refer to my partner as my partner because it feels far more appropriate after dating for 7 years than "girlfriend." I also don't care whether others assume I am straight or gay.
I don't think people outside the midwest understand just how ubiquitous "you guys" is here. After a previous time this discussion occurred on HN, I had to chuckle to myself when I heard my sister address a group of little girls as "you guys". It's our version of "y'all".
Even as far west as Colorado we used it the same way when I was young. Then I got a job at an NYC company and the gendered-ness of it was frowned upon. I actually switched to "ya'll" and it worked great. All the New Yorkers just thought that's how Coloradoans talk. So, thanks Texas.
Totally unrelated but this Blaze Foley song talks specifically about getting back to a place "where the people say ya'll." It's beautiful:
I am another Midwesterner who has largely switched from "you guys" to "y'all" (nit: ya'll is not considered correct spelling) after some lengthy and heated Slack discussions between Midwesterners and West Coast at $previousJob.
My first job was as a host at Red Lobster. I was reprimanded for saying "How are you guys doing today?" as I was seating a group of ladies. 16-year old me was trying my best to be polite, but language changes over time and that was one of my first introductions to code switching.
But this language has not been changing over time. This was a dictate from HR departments, made up from whole cloth. If anything has changed over time, it's that "gals" has been an anachronism for a long while, outside of a few isolated corners of the Southern and Western US where it can still manage to sound cute in some contexts. We don't really need a special diminutive for groups of women.
That being said, it's not formal language, it's chummy. If you're a 16 year old host at a restaurant speaking to a group of women older than you, you probably shouldn't be chummy.
I maintain that the sentence shows no disrespect to my Midwestern sensibilities. It's considered common courtesy to ask someone how their day is going, and I don't consider "you guys" to be a sign of disrespect. In fact, it seems quite clear to me that the parent was attempting to be warm and welcoming.
Warm and welcoming sure but too casual, you guys IMO implies familiarity, I wouldn't use it with strangers, could be regional or generational but that's my rural Illinoian take. Y'all is more flexible.
Fascinating - I'm from Michigan, and I would say "y'all" sounds more casual to my ears than "you guys." Formal speaking (in contrast to casual speaking) often eschews contractions.
I agree with the other poster. Missourian and "y'all" is ridiculously less formal than "you guys". To me, "y'all" is specifically informal and is used in exactly that manner, even in corporate emails. It denotes a more conversational tone that's open to feedback. "You guys" does not exist within formal/informal for me, it's either, neither, or both, just depending on what you say around it.
"How are you guys doing today" spoken at a red lobster is absolutely fine, completely normal language, whether spoken by the president or by a child. It's the single most ubiquitous and wholly normal greeting that i know. Corporate really over does it sometimes
That manner of social formality set sail a good 25 years ago my friend. On one hand I find it a shame, it was useful, on the other, it was also often misused (still exists in Korea where I now live, and it's abused like crazy here).
Considering the comment history of the person you are talking to (basically only ever replies to fight over social justice), I think they must be mentioning a real trend.
I'm answering in good faith, assuming the question is in good faith.
Latin@ (or latine or latinao) are all attempts to add non gendered versions of gendered words in Spanish.
Some percentage of the population, probably in the tenths of a percentage point, identify as non binary. Those people prefer to use non gendered indicators where possible.
That's ... kinda possible in English, where you can use they/them or replace father with parent, for instance.
In Romance languages this is much more difficult because adjectives are supposed to agree with the gender of the person -- for instance roja is red, feminine, and rojo is red, masculine.
So, there is a genuine movement by people who are non binary to try out different things. Combining the an and o, for instance, to get rojao, or roj@. Or using a third vowel to indicate gender neutrality, e.g. roje.
It's extremely important, imo, to differentiate this from Latinx. Latinx is an American English construct, latin@ is a Spanish language construct. Latinx is an almost exclusively American (and therefore largely exogenous concept to Spanish speakers), whereas latine is a Chilean/Argentinian construction that is endogenous.
Hope this comment is helpful, I'd ask that people vote on it based on whether they felt I made a good faith effort to factually answer this person's question, even if they dislike the idea of gender neutral Romance languages.
Isn't "folx" lingo or jargon? Like, let me explain a bit...
Just like "shade", "tea", and other queer lingo that was predominantly used within the queer community, "folx" was originally (in recent usage) a term that was used by some queer folk as a signal to indicate safety and inclusiveness.
But like "shade", some outsiders heard that jargon and started using it in communities where it wasn't common, and didn't carry the original intent, and so it looked confusing or annoying.
I think it's fine for communities to have vernacular words that are understood within their community, I suspect the real "villains" here to you are the folk who pull that jargon out and try to make it widespread.
People absolutely say "folks" in person nowadays (of course you wouldn't be able to hear a distinction between "ks" and "x"). It's common (although, yes, mediated by subculture) around where I live.
I grew up in a culture where nobody had a problem with "you guys". I am really not that old, and I still live in the same city.
As for "not carrying the original intent" - I don't see how there's any meaningful difference in intent.
These are all black American words, not "queer lingo." Other than "folks" which is Southern, but comes to upper-middle class white people through Obama's act of pretending he had ever met black Americans before college at UCLA.
They come from the long tradition of gay men copying black American female mannerisms, not anything "queer."
> I suspect the real "villains" here to you are the folk who pull that jargon out and try to make it widespread.
Gay men have contributed a lot to world culture, they're not villains.
Go watch Paris is Burning. They absolutely are Black queer lingo for decades prior to them becoming known outside Black communities. Which then became queer lingo. Which then became popular lingo.
> Gay men have contributed a lot to world culture, they're not villains
Absolutely, I never insinuated otherwise. I also don't believe it's villainous to share one's culture and lingo. But the op who objected to folx appears to think that it is bad. Take it up with them!
They are referring to "shade" and "tea". Eg in "That's the tea. All tea, no shade."
Meaning "that's the truth, the straight truth, no disrespect intended".
These terms rose in popularity in the ballroom scene in New York. (Note: not ballroom dancing, but rather "drag ball" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_culture). The culture of that scene was predominantly Black and Latino.
Evidence that white people came up with Latinx? My sense was always that Hispanic leftists came up with it, and it was then amplified by their white leftist friends.
Which is maybe a distinction without a difference, and I realize that you were probably just making a pithy statement. But I think its important if we want to examine how something like that actually came to be.
It's true! But it's also imprecise because of that ambiguity. Take the following construction, "Now, all you guys are going to step off the dance floor."
Which could mean everyone clear out, or just the fellahs.
I don't get worried about people preferring a term that isn't "you guys", because it's probably an improvement to the language over all, even if it's some friction to change.
I don't think anyone would use that construction though in the midwest if they only meant the men. If they wanted all the guys to get off the dance floor they would say "Now, all the guys are going to step off the dance floor." "The guys" is much different than "you guys", at least where I live.
Granted, it is murky so I also don't really care about switching to y'all. The only problem I have with "y'all" is that it is such a southern thing that using it to me with my midwest accent sounds forced and awkward (At least to my ears).
This doesn't seem ambiguous. "All you guys are" seems to be narrowing the focus of the sentence, because otherwise it would be more fluidly spoken as "all of you are", and it sounds unnatural to add to the sentence for no other purpose. (It sounds somewhat unnatural under either interpretation, though). If it had been "you guys are all", perhaps that would be ambiguous, but only with a strong emphasis on the word 'guys', which is not how the phrase is normally spoken. Either way I'd expect the dance teacher to be using hand gestures at the same time to indicate which people they're giving directions to.
"Guys" means "people". I have grown up in the Midwest as well where it's common to hear girls and women use it to address all-female groups. It's basically like how "mankind" or "man" is short for "humankind" or "human" and not for "male". These are also backed up in dictionaries that are more than a few years old
One of my former employers only a few years ago announced that they would ban the term "guys" because some people thought it was sexist. The ban was droppped because many people openly objected to the needless censorship while others simply saw no problem with the word and naturally just kept on using it. It was around the same time when coders and real estate agents were working to ban the term "master" from everything
I’ve said “you guys” all my life (grew up in the northeast) but I’m a professor and teach mixed-gender classes from all over the world. Plenty of people are completely fine with “guys” as a gender neutral term and express bafflement that there would be a problem. However: a non-trivial percentage find it weird, not necessarily because HR told them to, but because it really sounds odd to them. One person asked me if it would sound normal to ask “how many guys have you dated recently” and I took their point that this would indeed sound very gendered.
The lesson is: things that sounded normal to you and your peer group growing up might not work in the larger and more culturally diverse world you encounter professionally. So why insist on them? I’ve switched to “you folks” which makes me sound like I’m about to lead a square dance, but people seem to find it disarming.
In 18th century England it used to refer to women. The point being that language usage has both regional and temporal variance, so why not avoid terms that some people might find uncomfortable? I’m offering this not as a dictate from the language police, but as a suggestion to improve your effectiveness as a professional communicator - a skill that is highly correlated with long-term career success.
but why is the prescription for speakers to converge on a single homogenous blob of usage rather than encouraging listeners to acknowledge and understand the diversity of uses?
Gen Alpha (and younger Zoomers) are working hard to make "bro", "bruh" and "dude" gender-neutral[1] everywhere - and they are succeeding. In decade, those complaining about "you guys" will seem quaint.
"breh" was and will be gender-neutral in south Louisiana long after everyone else has forgotten any debates around whether or not it actually is or whatever it was co-opted from
have a feeling hawaiians feel similarly about "brah"/"braddah"
I’m on the west coast. I was talking to a neighbor about their barking dog and exclaimed “dude!” when she lied directly to my face (her dog was barking and she said it wasn’t her dog). Her reaction? Angrily saying she was a woman. Dude has been gender neutral for many decades around these parts.
"Thee" isn't the informal form of "thou", it's the oblique form, ie "the bell tolls for thee", you'd never say "the bell tolls for thou", no matter how formal or informal.
In early modern English, thou and thee were both the informal 2pp, with thou being the subject pronoun and thee being the object pronoun. Thou/you is similar to tu/vous. Eventually, thou became archaic, and we think of archaic words as being more formal.
(Aside: In Middle English, ye was strictly plural, but ye became acceptable as formal singular as well, again paralleling vous. And as an additional aside, in the "ye olde English" phrase, the ye is actually þe, where þ is thorn, which wasn't available when the printing press came to England.)
I think it's a bit of a stretch to say "y'all" somehow belongs to Texas, it's roots are almost certainly in other areas of the South and Appalachia where it is still used just as frequently as it is in modern-day Texas.
It's not worth a fight, but I can confirm I've only seen "ya'll" written by non-southern or Appalachian residents. I'm not saying it doesn't happen or shouldn't happen, but it would make me wonder about whether someone has adopted the word as a choice vs. it being just a word in their normal vocabulary.
Thou and Thee are nominative and objective cases. Same for You and Ye.
The formality/informality distinction is between You/Ye and Thou/Thee.
Plural 2nd person used to formally address a single individual came to English from French, thanks to the Norman Conquest.
French, I think, inherited it from Latin, and the custom of addressing the emperor with the plural.
After a while it became rude to address people with the informal 2nd person singular.
By the time of the King James Bible, iirc, English had already switched to universal "you", and "thou" was brought back in order to indicate where the source text had used a singular versus a plural.
"What is thy bidding, my master" is therefore foreshadowing of later insubordination.
> "What is thy bidding, my master" is therefore foreshadowing of later insubordination.
It's more likely the usage of "thy" in this instance was meant to reflect the style and largely supplicatory diction of the Pater Noster (i.e. "thy Kingdom come\thy will be done...")
> because it supports second-person plural via "Y'all" exactly as mentioned in this article... "you guys" is, to some ears, sexist
Many people nowadays are happy to use "singular they" to refer to specific, definite individuals whose gender is not in question, and seem not to worry at all about creating ambiguity with the ordinary plural use of "they" (despite frequently doing so). So why would they care about being able to distinguish singular from plural in the second person, either?
It's usually very clear from context whether singular-gender-neutral they or plural-they is on use.
"you" is most frequently used in direct address, a context where it is frequently necessary to distinguish between addressing an individual in a group or the group as a whole
In Michigan, "you guys" is as gender neutral as a phrase can get. I think it's kind of funny, but it's completely true. (And frankly, I think most of the language policing stuff like this is just vastly overthinking things anyway, but that's just my opinion.)
That said, I got into a habit of saying "y'all" in high school anyways, mainly because it's fun to say.
There's also "Yinz", these days mostly used in Pittsburgh (and even then mostly by older people). It is unfairly dismissed as "regional" in the article, but so are the others, really.
I believe y'all is growing substantially in geographic prevalence over the past 10 years or so. Most people who are exposed to it for a little while tend to assimilate it into their own lexicon surprisingly quickly - the gap in English is really a vacuum that very much wants to be filled.
Personally, I desperately want a socially-adoptable singular vs. plural differentiation for "them".
Yep, it makes a perfect second-person plural —- my Latin teacher always made us conjugate verbs as “I, you, he/she/it, we, y’all, they”. And then constructions like “laudate, omnes” became “all y’all, SING!”
I like "Hi Team". I do use that in certain social circles, but I do get the point of the article.
Survivor, the US TV show, used to say "Come on in guys" until recently where they made a point to discuss the topic on camera with the contestants. There was a variety of opinions, but they ultimately settled on "Come on in." which conveys the point in a neutral tone.
"Team" makes sense when addressing... well, your team, like if you're in a huddle of basketball players. But there are many contexts where it doesn't make sense as a general purpose second person plural.
Counter-proposal: Bring back "thou" as the second person singular pronoun and restore "you" to its rightful place as the second person plural pronoun.
As with so many of English's warts we can blame the French for the situation we're in. Vous in French is used when addressing a single person formally and conveys respect for the addressee. When class and station were more important following the Norman conquest of England, English speakers adopted the use of "you" to address a single person of higher status following the French custom. It's use became more widespread over time lest the speaker offend someone by using "thou" when the addressee thought that "you" was warranted.
As a practical matter, I use y'all. I think thou is a lovely word in its own right and is deserving of consideration.
N.b. IANALinguist, and IANAHistorian either. TINLinguisticA.
I don't have enough linguistic background to understand the distinction, but I've also heard that using "will" for "intent to do something in the future" is somehow linguistically unusual because previously that job was used by "shall".
Sorry I can't give more details, I forget what the actual distinction between the two is. I just recall that it apparently creates difficulty when English speakers learn Romance languages that still have their equivalent of "shall".
Edit:
Apparently, the distinction can either be a lot more relevant or a lot less relevant than I thought depending on the context (e.g. legal text vs. everyday speech).
It's interesting how much of language is invisible to a native speaker. If you had asked me, I would have said that most people never use "shall". However, now that the article points it out, I realize that native speakers use "Shall we <verb>" all the time.
"will" used to mean "to want", like its cognates in Dutch or German still do. However, it's not really unusual, it's quite common for desiderative forms of verbs to evolve into expressing a future tense, something similar happened independently in a few Indo-European language families, like Greek, Albanian, Celtic etc...
"Y'all" has been common for a while among Anglo-Indians in South India. I was quite surprised when I first went online among the predominantly American early-Internet community and discovered that y'all consider it a peculiarity of the American South. I've always liked it, though I don't use it anymore now that I live in the US (where it is a marker of the South).
As a New Englander, I am quite partial to "y'all" and "you all", mostly in written form. It is indeed a quite capable substitute to "you guys". But to my ear, "yall" is ever so slightly more informal than "you all", and so sometimes it doesn't feel exactly right.
Maybe like 3 years ago, people I know will use it exactly like y'all. Just last night I was hanging out with some (late 20's, early 30's) friends and my buddy said, "Chat, what are we having for dinner" exactly how you would say "Hey y'all...". This has become really common amongst young millennials I know.
Is it second person though? It feels like most of the times I've heard it in person, outside of a real livestream, it's sort of been for asking a question into the aether as emphasis.
"Chat, are you seeing this?" to emphasize something stupid they're seeing. It's not really spoken TO the person doing the stupid thing, it's spoken to this imaginary crowd to emphasize that what the other person is doing is obviously stupid.
I guess it sort of depends on who you imagine in the conversation. If it was actually directed at a real twitch stream chat, it would be second person. So not sure how to square that circle.
I could imagine saying "God, are you seeing this?" to playfully emphasize something sinful they're seeing. Or similarly "Hey FBI, did you know about this?" to playfully point out that something is (or seems) illegal. Or someone says "Mike Tyson isn't that great a fighter" and someone else pretends to look at someone behind them and go "Hey Mike, what do you think about that?". It's all kinda just pretending some other entity is watching these events for humor, and I think it's all just 2nd person.
Or you could say something like "Chat likes it when I rap", but that's similar to "God likes it when I genuflect after making a touchdown" or something -- it's just standard 3rd person with a flair.
People have a tendency to over-emphasize how unique new speech patterns are. This same thing happened with "literally" being English's first "auto-antonym" -- it wasn't really, it was just a slightly different form of sarcasm. "OMG I literally died! Like I'm genuinely dead now. None of you are hearing this because I'm totes a corpse. I'm completely serious you guys, I literally have no pulse anymore." -- I can imagine all of that being in the same vein, but it's hard to argue that that means "genuinely" and "totes" and "completely" are all auto-antonyms too. Or that "riiiiiight" is an auto-antonym because it actually means "wrong". Things just aren't that new in language.
Ahhhh yeah I see what you mean. I'm probably thinking a bit too literally about 2nd person vs 3rd person. My example is an imaginary side conversation, where "you" = "Chat", so it's 2nd person, but the intent to me "feels" third person when spoken, as chat/God/Mike etc would never refer to someone in the room. (not that it matters in the context of labeling something 1st/2nd/3rd person in this case though) That's what's messing me up I think. Sorry about that.
And your God example, yeah maybe this is not a new linguistic phenomenon haha. I can very much imagine some middle age priests taking a jab at one another with "God, are you seeing this?" as father Percival takes another swig from the hip flask.
It is definitely second person plural. I have heard my daughter use it (deliberately ironically) many times not in the form of questions, like "Chat, today we're going to be making toast."
I admit that I have never heard it used in anyway except as a noun of direct address, so it may not be a full-featured second person plural pronoun.
I've heard it referred to as a "fourth person pronoun" in that it also breaks the "fourth wall", and the excitement that English is the first language to invent a fourth person pronoun.
Though, I've also found Shakespearean scholars want to argue that while English did invent the fourth person pronoun, Shakespeare did it first with "Gentles" in several plays, most notably Puck's fourth wall break speech in Midsummer Night's Dream. (It is fun to give that speech with "Gentles" replaced as "Chat". To keep the rhythm you use the two syllable callout form of "Chat", which does exist in plenty of Twitch examples.)
Thanks all y’all for y’all. I’m taking y’all. I love y’all. Because “y’all” is the best, most inclusive second-person, plural pronoun in the English-speaking world. Thank you, the South. What an ally.
In spanish we have the distinction naturally: USTED, USTEDES
Another example of genuine language tools dismissed as "Incorrect" is African American Vernacular English's "you be", "he be" tense. I don't know the exact distinction, Steven Pinker explains it well.
On that note, "that there rooster" is perfecty valid English as well.
Y'all is the American informal second-person plural pronoun
Spanish: "ustedes" (formal) and "vosotros" (informal in Spain) or "vos" in some regions
French: "vous" is the standard, but informally there's "vous autres" in Quebec French
Portuguese: "vocês" formally, but "cês" informally in Brazilian Portuguese
German: While "ihr" is standard, some dialects use "ihr alle" or regional variants
Italian: "voi" is standard, but some southern dialects use "vujatri" or similar variants
Greek: "εσείς" (eseis) formally, but informally "εσείς όλοι" (eseis oli)
Russian: "вы" (vy) is standard, but "вы все" (vy vse) is used for emphasis
Arabic: "أنتم" (antum) is standard, with "إنتو" (intu) in dialects
I am most fascinated by Y'alls', a double possessive or possessive plural contraction which is common in Southern American English and AAVE (African American Vernacular English) which would otherwise be constructed more awkwardly in common American English as "all of your" or "your all's."
(Sidenote: when we were teenagers my sister and I referred to one pastor as "the polytheist", because he always said "in Jesus's name", which we chose to interpret as "in Jesuses' name". God, I'm a nerd.)
Vous is also the polite singular second person pronoun in French so they are part way to losing the singular.
I did not know the abbreviation "AAVE" but its always struck me as odd how much a shared language has split along racial lines. I wonder whether there are similar things elsewhere. Obviously where people speak English as a second language and speak different first language they might speak it a bit differently, as might (recent) immigrant communities, but those are both very different.
When I learned German, I started using “y’all” in English because I got used to using a plural you. I’ve never lived anywhere near the south, but once you start using it, it feels weird not to.
I grew up in Texas and lived in Ohio for a year during middle school. So of course I said y'all. I'll tell you what - kids that age will laser in on anything to cast someone as an outsider, and for me that year it was that word.
Soon after moving back to Texas I regained confidence in saying the word. I think these days the only people that draw any attention to the word are non americans, so maybe it's proliferated a bit more in the last 2 decades.
Y'all forever. One of the few southern mannerisms I intentionally don't drop as a lapsed southerner in California.
As an aside, I find it strange how many aspects of "the south" are labeled as "Texan" outside the south. I lived and visited all over the Deep South and y'all was standard vernacular pretty much everywhere. I'm not saying Texans don't say y'all, but they definitely don't have any unique claim to using it as second-person plural.
I grew up mostly in the north and talk very northernly, but somehow the only exception is that 'howdy' became my standard greeting. 'yall' feels like too much, but 'howdy' just rolls off the tongue so smoothly. Other greetings always sound too terse (hi, hey), too formal (hello), or are questions (how's it going, what's up) which I just loathe. Though technically howdy is sort of a question too, coming from 'how do you do'.
What's 'a piece'? Don't think I've heard that one.
Midwesterner here - I use y'all all the time and nobody says anything about it. I live in an area where "yunz" is more popular (not quite yins) and I just hate the sound of that word. So y'all it is!
I’m a Pittsburgher who moved to Indianapolis when I was 7. I remember encountering the word y’all and thinking, “oh they just mean yinz.” I wonder if someone came from an area where neither are common, if the first encounter is more jarring?
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadstill, brilliant nonetheless.
Y'all is plural. All y'all is short for all of y'all.
But if you're referring to a set of birds and fish together, then the usage is "all y'all" because the canonical partition yields more than one subset (one containing birds, and one containing fish). The distinction helps differentiate between whether you mean the superset or one of those subsets.
It works with any other partition which might be obvious (not just birds and fish). If you have two families together, you might avoid "see y'all later" because it could be interpreted that you only expect to see one family later. "see all y'all later", by contrast is unabiguous--you mean both families.
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Did I get it right? Am I a true Texan?
There's another usage that comes to mind, though. One might argue that "y'all" borders on a second person plural inclusive of the speaker whereas "all y'all" marks a distinction between the speaker and the others. For instance, a peeved person would be more likely to say, "All y'all can kiss my ass," as opposed to, "Y'all can kiss my ass." "Y'all" by itself is more friendly and self-inclusive than "all y'all", which carries an inherent otherness to it.
I'm under the impression that the double negative is a relatively modern thing (early 1800's). Previously, repetition of the negative just reinforced it, like:
> I ain't never put syrup on my bacon on purpose
...just double-enphasized the negative, rather than letting the second negative negate the first. This feels similar except instead of stacking negations you're stacking separations.
So a first person plural?
Grammatical constructs can have a lot of variation between languages, and there are certainly nuances that can't be expressed in English the same way that it can be in other languages. One thing we lack is a nuanced sense of past, while other languages have baked in ways to express recent past or distant past (e.g. Bantu languages).
My proposed interpretation regarding "all y'all" is not academic, just a native feel, and I'm sure other native speakers could disagree.
Y’all can kiss my ass; ladies and polite company excluded of course.
All y’all can kiss my ass.
All y'all need to come to my BBQ tomorrow. I can't eat 50 pounds of brisket by myself.
Be the change you want to see, and start with "Dear Y'all."
(and yes, I am from western PA)
English lost its second person plural when we switched from Thou (second person singular formal + Thee=second person singular informal) and Ye (second person plural) to just "You", but Texans rightly have solved the problem and kept the clarity. (The more-modern "Yo" is delightfully brief but as ambiguous as "you".)
Now... if you want to tease a Texan back about all this, you can ask them whether that implies the proper phrase for when you enter Texas then should be "Abandon hope all y'all (was: ye) who enter here!"
is it though?
(edit: fix grammar)
So "the guys" or "how many guys" always refers to men, but "you guys" carries no implication of gender at all. I often hear people address groups consisting entirely of women as "guys", and nobody bats an eye.
You can receive something a certain way that was not intended by a sender.
It's important to try to understand the intent of the sender. In this case, many cultures sending the message "you guys" don't internally view this as relating to gender.
You could try to change their culture because many people receive it wrong, or you could learn about the culture and try to change the receivers culture.
Sometimes you can't accept the differences because it's perpetuates too much harm.
Where to draw the line is an ongoing and difficult question.
"Guys" is certainly gendered, so I understand folks feeling like "you guys" is as well.
As ‘guy’ is normally a male.
But sexist would imply that it degrades either women or men, which I don’t think it does in this case?
And I've heard "yousuns" in the North
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou
You could be singular or plural, but it was always formal. (compare the vous- form, in french)
Knowing this puts a whole new spin on things like the KJV, since as moderns we hear "thou" and think "fancy old timey speech! very formal!" and it is exactly the opposite.
Quakers/Friends chose the thou- form as the preferred form to address everyone; this was part of their scandalous behavior at the time, because it was heard as being entirely improper. (For their part, Quakers figure we're all equal before God, so why pay too much attention to social status? -- and that's not a bad point, really!)
Another similar dialect isogloss-ish that often goes with that is dropping the past-tense "I saw" and replacing it with the past-participle "I seen". Or, alternatively, another way of putting it is that it's dropping the "have" in "I've seen"
Middle class parents and teachers definitely scolded kids for speaking this way when I was growing up. Was seen as lower class.
https://www.daredictionary.com/search?q=yous&searchBtn=
While I don't have a subscription to it (I haven't justified $50/year for that to myself) you will see that "youse" comes up with an "explore more" for Great Lakes, North Midland, and Northeast and "youse-all" shows up as Middle Atlantic.
Since moving overseas and studying other languages (Slavic and Baltic languages) I think it's definitely something needed in English. I think I still use youse, I never note it. It's just something that's so naturally useful it wouldn't occur to me that I'm saying something weird or forced.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinz
(The answer one does not want to hear, at least in Georgia, is "is Pepsi OK?")
To take someone down a peg if they seem full of themselves, you can use the majestic singular satirically. As in: I just got a fancy new car! Gosh, did y’all get seat warmers with it too?
And yes, this is a real expression that is used in parts of the US, not pure comedy.
It's literally a contraction for "you all". That doesn't make sense for talking to one person.
Do many people actually see this as a novel word? It's incredibly common from my perspective here in Ohio.
I also hear people say "folks" when that is also borrowed from Southern US English
I say y'all because it has one less syllable than the other options while retaining clarity
I wasn’t raised to say it, and unfortunately I’ve got this lingering association with southern racist / ignorant hillbillies usage the term. “Y’all better get along now y’hear?” So it always feels weird coming out of my mouth.
Where I live, yeah. I live in Minnesota and I intentionally use "y'all" here because I think it neatly fills the need and I want it to catch on, but it definitely feels like an affectation. It's not something you hear unless someone is from out of town or going out of their way to use it intentionally (like me).
I've heard of the the mythical gender neutral guys but having spent my life in classes and a career field where being the only woman is the standard, the amount of times folks are like "good morning guys… and girl" or "good morning fellas… and lady" is just comical at this point. Clearly speakers aren't imaging a mixed group when they say it.
It's been the same for me in the midwest and northeast.
I think it's not so much they imagined what they were saying before they said it, it's that they reached for the handy phrase for addressing a group without thinking, and then only afterwards realised it. At least that's what I would do.
I wonder what it would feel like if I joined a majority female class and was addressed as "good morning ladies, and man". I've never been in the situation unfortunately.
Another phrase would be good. I vote for youse all.
Another word from Texas that drives me crazy is "heighth". I don't know why people add the h at the end when they say it, but nobody spells it that way.
My sense (as a native New York person who grew up around an older generation many of whom naturally used "youse") is that use of "youse" may have been somewhat correlated with being a member of a European-descent pre-WW2-immigration-origin Catholic-identifying ethnic group (so, in particular, Irish, Italian, German), but I'm not even sure that's so.
By the time I was growing up, "youse" was a class and (maybe secondarily) ethnic marker, largely rejected by the Baby Boomers and later generations in favor of the more nationally standard "you guys". If the seemingly redundant "youse guys" occurs at all it must be an odd conglomeration of the older and newer usage.
(In practise, I write ye more than I say it, I think.)
It can mean “male person”, but that’s only if you use it in specific contexts that brings up gender (like saying “guys and gals”).
But I've definitely heard people refer to groups composed entirely of women as "you guys".
And anyway the masculine plural being genderless is a convention of romance languages, which english is not. It is not useful or consistent to describe expectations for english usage in terms of the features of other languages. Negative concord and invariant be are common language features globally but you don't hear white americans scrambling to include them in standard usage.
Identity politics has resulted in certain groups making concerted efforts to try to eliminate such usages, but it's still an ingrained part of our language.
If you call a plumber and they say “I’ll send a guy over”, there’s no implication that it’s male. Singular and genderless.
- You might not know their status (married? Dating?) and the phrase “significant other” is clunky
- for grown adults, terms like boyfriend/girlfriend can come off as a little dismissive or juvenile
To me it's simple
1. Married -> Husband/Wife
2. Dating -> Girlfriend/Boyfriend
3. Middle Ground -> Fiance/fiancee
I've yet to see a case this doesn't cover so "partner" seems like a solution looking for a problem.
There are plenty of couples who may as well be married, but choose not to participate in that social construct.
Your comment about correctness is a bit ironic in context however.
That’s like thinking “I can just replace null with 0 or empty string. Means the same thing”
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9cw3gb/you_guys_v_...
Totally unrelated but this Blaze Foley song talks specifically about getting back to a place "where the people say ya'll." It's beautiful:
https://blazefoley.bandcamp.com/track/clay-pigeons
P.S. Michael Cera does a nice cover of that song.
I grew up using guys just to refer to group of people
I love it. I blame France, specifically Remulac.
But this language has not been changing over time. This was a dictate from HR departments, made up from whole cloth. If anything has changed over time, it's that "gals" has been an anachronism for a long while, outside of a few isolated corners of the Southern and Western US where it can still manage to sound cute in some contexts. We don't really need a special diminutive for groups of women.
That being said, it's not formal language, it's chummy. If you're a 16 year old host at a restaurant speaking to a group of women older than you, you probably shouldn't be chummy.
"How are you guys doing today" spoken at a red lobster is absolutely fine, completely normal language, whether spoken by the president or by a child. It's the single most ubiquitous and wholly normal greeting that i know. Corporate really over does it sometimes
By one of the ladies, or by a manager who overheard you?
Well, I mooched it, and have seen it propagate here in the Northwest. Will not be long before it takes more general hold as we exchange people.
I seem to be bumping into it here (PDX) area more these days.
My favorite bit in all this is:
"All Y'all" which is simply plural for "Y'all", plus a subtle bit of familiarity state info.
If everyone is close, in agreement, likely to act as one, then "y'all" works for single as well as multiple people.
All y'all gets invoked when the group has differences. Maybe a few couples, or some people are new, or may be disagreeable in some way.
English is a lot of fun, because it allows for a very robust ad-hoc communication. Over time, the lexicon is never dull!
Is that a real thing or are you joking?
Latin@ (or latine or latinao) are all attempts to add non gendered versions of gendered words in Spanish.
Some percentage of the population, probably in the tenths of a percentage point, identify as non binary. Those people prefer to use non gendered indicators where possible.
That's ... kinda possible in English, where you can use they/them or replace father with parent, for instance.
In Romance languages this is much more difficult because adjectives are supposed to agree with the gender of the person -- for instance roja is red, feminine, and rojo is red, masculine.
So, there is a genuine movement by people who are non binary to try out different things. Combining the an and o, for instance, to get rojao, or roj@. Or using a third vowel to indicate gender neutrality, e.g. roje.
It's extremely important, imo, to differentiate this from Latinx. Latinx is an American English construct, latin@ is a Spanish language construct. Latinx is an almost exclusively American (and therefore largely exogenous concept to Spanish speakers), whereas latine is a Chilean/Argentinian construction that is endogenous.
Hope this comment is helpful, I'd ask that people vote on it based on whether they felt I made a good faith effort to factually answer this person's question, even if they dislike the idea of gender neutral Romance languages.
Just like "shade", "tea", and other queer lingo that was predominantly used within the queer community, "folx" was originally (in recent usage) a term that was used by some queer folk as a signal to indicate safety and inclusiveness.
But like "shade", some outsiders heard that jargon and started using it in communities where it wasn't common, and didn't carry the original intent, and so it looked confusing or annoying.
I think it's fine for communities to have vernacular words that are understood within their community, I suspect the real "villains" here to you are the folk who pull that jargon out and try to make it widespread.
I grew up in a culture where nobody had a problem with "you guys". I am really not that old, and I still live in the same city.
As for "not carrying the original intent" - I don't see how there's any meaningful difference in intent.
> I grew up in a culture where nobody had a problem with "you guys".
Did no one have a problem? Or did no one voice a problem? I'd believe the latter, but I don't know how it would be possible to know the former.
They come from the long tradition of gay men copying black American female mannerisms, not anything "queer."
> I suspect the real "villains" here to you are the folk who pull that jargon out and try to make it widespread.
Gay men have contributed a lot to world culture, they're not villains.
> Gay men have contributed a lot to world culture, they're not villains
Absolutely, I never insinuated otherwise. I also don't believe it's villainous to share one's culture and lingo. But the op who objected to folx appears to think that it is bad. Take it up with them!
Meaning "that's the truth, the straight truth, no disrespect intended".
These terms rose in popularity in the ballroom scene in New York. (Note: not ballroom dancing, but rather "drag ball" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_culture). The culture of that scene was predominantly Black and Latino.
I've never seen "folx."
Which is maybe a distinction without a difference, and I realize that you were probably just making a pithy statement. But I think its important if we want to examine how something like that actually came to be.
Which could mean everyone clear out, or just the fellahs.
I don't get worried about people preferring a term that isn't "you guys", because it's probably an improvement to the language over all, even if it's some friction to change.
Granted, it is murky so I also don't really care about switching to y'all. The only problem I have with "y'all" is that it is such a southern thing that using it to me with my midwest accent sounds forced and awkward (At least to my ears).
One of my former employers only a few years ago announced that they would ban the term "guys" because some people thought it was sexist. The ban was droppped because many people openly objected to the needless censorship while others simply saw no problem with the word and naturally just kept on using it. It was around the same time when coders and real estate agents were working to ban the term "master" from everything
The lesson is: things that sounded normal to you and your peer group growing up might not work in the larger and more culturally diverse world you encounter professionally. So why insist on them? I’ve switched to “you folks” which makes me sound like I’m about to lead a square dance, but people seem to find it disarming.
"how many guys have you dated" is not a collective noun.
Gen Alpha (and younger Zoomers) are working hard to make "bro", "bruh" and "dude" gender-neutral[1] everywhere - and they are succeeding. In decade, those complaining about "you guys" will seem quaint.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/184ni9j/does_any...
"breh" was and will be gender-neutral in south Louisiana long after everyone else has forgotten any debates around whether or not it actually is or whatever it was co-opted from
have a feeling hawaiians feel similarly about "brah"/"braddah"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou#History
Also in etymonline "By c. 1450 the use of thou to address inferiors gave it a tinge of insult"
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Thou
(Aside: In Middle English, ye was strictly plural, but ye became acceptable as formal singular as well, again paralleling vous. And as an additional aside, in the "ye olde English" phrase, the ye is actually þe, where þ is thorn, which wasn't available when the printing press came to England.)
The formality/informality distinction is between You/Ye and Thou/Thee.
Plural 2nd person used to formally address a single individual came to English from French, thanks to the Norman Conquest.
French, I think, inherited it from Latin, and the custom of addressing the emperor with the plural.
After a while it became rude to address people with the informal 2nd person singular.
By the time of the King James Bible, iirc, English had already switched to universal "you", and "thou" was brought back in order to indicate where the source text had used a singular versus a plural.
"What is thy bidding, my master" is therefore foreshadowing of later insubordination.
It's more likely the usage of "thy" in this instance was meant to reflect the style and largely supplicatory diction of the Pater Noster (i.e. "thy Kingdom come\thy will be done...")
Use "thou" where one would use "I" if discussing onesself. Use "thee" where one would use "me".
Many people nowadays are happy to use "singular they" to refer to specific, definite individuals whose gender is not in question, and seem not to worry at all about creating ambiguity with the ordinary plural use of "they" (despite frequently doing so). So why would they care about being able to distinguish singular from plural in the second person, either?
"you" is most frequently used in direct address, a context where it is frequently necessary to distinguish between addressing an individual in a group or the group as a whole
That said, I got into a habit of saying "y'all" in high school anyways, mainly because it's fun to say.
I'll be the HN troglodyte who loves to build from first principles:
Why not just "Abandon hope all who enter here?"
Does that leave humanity open to lawsuits from corvids or something?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinz
Personally, I desperately want a socially-adoptable singular vs. plural differentiation for "them".
0. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/yall-youuns-yinz-youse...
"What do youse want to do?" <= you're from the NY/Phila/I-95 axis
"What do youse guys want to do?" <= you've some exposure to American dialects
"What do y'all want to do?" <= you're an American or playing one in a movie
Survivor, the US TV show, used to say "Come on in guys" until recently where they made a point to discuss the topic on camera with the contestants. There was a variety of opinions, but they ultimately settled on "Come on in." which conveys the point in a neutral tone.
As with so many of English's warts we can blame the French for the situation we're in. Vous in French is used when addressing a single person formally and conveys respect for the addressee. When class and station were more important following the Norman conquest of England, English speakers adopted the use of "you" to address a single person of higher status following the French custom. It's use became more widespread over time lest the speaker offend someone by using "thou" when the addressee thought that "you" was warranted.
As a practical matter, I use y'all. I think thou is a lovely word in its own right and is deserving of consideration.
N.b. IANALinguist, and IANAHistorian either. TINLinguisticA.
Sorry I can't give more details, I forget what the actual distinction between the two is. I just recall that it apparently creates difficulty when English speakers learn Romance languages that still have their equivalent of "shall".
Edit:
Apparently, the distinction can either be a lot more relevant or a lot less relevant than I thought depending on the context (e.g. legal text vs. everyday speech).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shall_and_will
It's interesting how much of language is invisible to a native speaker. If you had asked me, I would have said that most people never use "shall". However, now that the article points it out, I realize that native speakers use "Shall we <verb>" all the time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/18/magazine/yall.html
I can't decide if I'm making a joke or not by saying that.
"Chat, are you seeing this?" to emphasize something stupid they're seeing. It's not really spoken TO the person doing the stupid thing, it's spoken to this imaginary crowd to emphasize that what the other person is doing is obviously stupid.
I guess it sort of depends on who you imagine in the conversation. If it was actually directed at a real twitch stream chat, it would be second person. So not sure how to square that circle.
Or you could say something like "Chat likes it when I rap", but that's similar to "God likes it when I genuflect after making a touchdown" or something -- it's just standard 3rd person with a flair.
People have a tendency to over-emphasize how unique new speech patterns are. This same thing happened with "literally" being English's first "auto-antonym" -- it wasn't really, it was just a slightly different form of sarcasm. "OMG I literally died! Like I'm genuinely dead now. None of you are hearing this because I'm totes a corpse. I'm completely serious you guys, I literally have no pulse anymore." -- I can imagine all of that being in the same vein, but it's hard to argue that that means "genuinely" and "totes" and "completely" are all auto-antonyms too. Or that "riiiiiight" is an auto-antonym because it actually means "wrong". Things just aren't that new in language.
And your God example, yeah maybe this is not a new linguistic phenomenon haha. I can very much imagine some middle age priests taking a jab at one another with "God, are you seeing this?" as father Percival takes another swig from the hip flask.
I admit that I have never heard it used in anyway except as a noun of direct address, so it may not be a full-featured second person plural pronoun.
Though, I've also found Shakespearean scholars want to argue that while English did invent the fourth person pronoun, Shakespeare did it first with "Gentles" in several plays, most notably Puck's fourth wall break speech in Midsummer Night's Dream. (It is fun to give that speech with "Gentles" replaced as "Chat". To keep the rhythm you use the two syllable callout form of "Chat", which does exist in plenty of Twitch examples.)
— Hannah Gadsby, Douglas
1st person, ME, US
2nd person, YOU, Y'ALL
3rd person, HE/SHE/THEY, THEY
In spanish we have the distinction naturally: USTED, USTEDES
Another example of genuine language tools dismissed as "Incorrect" is African American Vernacular English's "you be", "he be" tense. I don't know the exact distinction, Steven Pinker explains it well.
On that note, "that there rooster" is perfecty valid English as well.
This is bigoted anti-Texas slander.
Spanish: "ustedes" (formal) and "vosotros" (informal in Spain) or "vos" in some regions
French: "vous" is the standard, but informally there's "vous autres" in Quebec French
Portuguese: "vocês" formally, but "cês" informally in Brazilian Portuguese
German: While "ihr" is standard, some dialects use "ihr alle" or regional variants
Italian: "voi" is standard, but some southern dialects use "vujatri" or similar variants
Greek: "εσείς" (eseis) formally, but informally "εσείς όλοι" (eseis oli)
Russian: "вы" (vy) is standard, but "вы все" (vy vse) is used for emphasis
Arabic: "أنتم" (antum) is standard, with "إنتو" (intu) in dialects
I am most fascinated by Y'alls', a double possessive or possessive plural contraction which is common in Southern American English and AAVE (African American Vernacular English) which would otherwise be constructed more awkwardly in common American English as "all of your" or "your all's."
I'm enjoying you guyses thread.
Waiter: "Can I get you guys's orders?"
Non-standard (as written: "you guys' "), but speakers notoriously add extraneous " 's"s.
(Sidenote: when we were teenagers my sister and I referred to one pastor as "the polytheist", because he always said "in Jesus's name", which we chose to interpret as "in Jesuses' name". God, I'm a nerd.)
I did not know the abbreviation "AAVE" but its always struck me as odd how much a shared language has split along racial lines. I wonder whether there are similar things elsewhere. Obviously where people speak English as a second language and speak different first language they might speak it a bit differently, as might (recent) immigrant communities, but those are both very different.
Soon after moving back to Texas I regained confidence in saying the word. I think these days the only people that draw any attention to the word are non americans, so maybe it's proliferated a bit more in the last 2 decades.
As an aside, I find it strange how many aspects of "the south" are labeled as "Texan" outside the south. I lived and visited all over the Deep South and y'all was standard vernacular pretty much everywhere. I'm not saying Texans don't say y'all, but they definitely don't have any unique claim to using it as second-person plural.
I unapologetically, unironically use "howdy", "a piece", "a ways", "over yonder", "get to goin'", and "fixin' to". But "y'all" is a bridge too far.
Love a good "over yonder" though.
What's 'a piece'? Don't think I've heard that one.
"She lives up the road a piece."