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The construction of the word to me implies that "you" is singular, whereas "y'all" is plural.

To a football team: "Y'all are going to play a great game." To a tennis player: "You are going to play a great game."

However, I hear southerners address me personally as Y'all quite often.

What's the correct usage?

Aside: Comments that y'all is improper are not helpful.

hawbsl
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Chris Cudmore
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    I'm a Southerner of the "you/y'all" variety (although all y'all doesn't sound foreign), so I'm curious if you could give a couple of examples where they're addressing you personally with y'all. I sometimes wonder if it's not either a phonetic misunderstanding (e.g. a drawled 'ya' for you) or a situation where you may be the only person in the room, but the speaker is talking/asking not only about you but also 'your people' (e.g. family, colleagues, whatever is context appropriate) – Dusty Jan 06 '11 at 20:14
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    A quick google had the following quote on the wikipedia page for y'all which sort of lines up with what i'd think: Nevertheless, it has been questioned very often, and with a considerable showing of evidence. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, to be sure, you-all indicates a plural, implicit if not explicit, and thus means, when addressed to a single person, 'you and your folks' or the like, but the hundredth time it is impossible to discover any such extension of meaning. – H.L. Mencken,The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States – Dusty Jan 06 '11 at 20:16
  • @Dusty -- This makes sense. The speakers could be referring to me and my team collectively rather than just me. They could also be referring to my company as a collective. – Chris Cudmore Jan 06 '11 at 20:30
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    @chris - Yeah, both of those scenarios are highly plausible. It's fairly common in any situation where the person is expecting you to act as a speaker for some collective group, and the y'all is the marker that they're interested in the group, not just the individual in front of them. – Dusty Jan 06 '11 at 21:18
  • @Dusty: I wonder if the rare personal use of "y'all" might not be something like, "y'll come back, now, hear?" directed to an individual. The phrase is so stereotypical that it might be used in the plural form, even when singular is intended. – John Saunders Jan 09 '11 at 00:56
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    @Dusty: I agree, the singular/plural distinction is appropriate whether a group is present or not at that moment. Saying, "I hope to see you at the game tomorrow" is different from saying, "I hope to see y'all at the game tomorrow", where y'all refers to your school or your team or your corporate sales team, or some other implied group that you're representing. – Wayne May 17 '11 at 20:07
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    Living in Texas for the past eight years I have heard the following used over and over: Y'all, y'alls, y'all's, all y'all, all y'alls, and all y'all's. (Think about this — "I bought y'all a yawl.") Can't wait to get back to Minnesota where all y'all have to deal with are ufda, ubetcha, ya shure you bet, don't ya know. –  Sep 09 '13 at 14:04
  • I know all Y'All laugh at us down south, but in Navy bootcamp there was a guy from Brooklyn that said "Youses Guyses". I think y'all is much better for talking about a group of folks! – jon wyat Apr 09 '17 at 01:04

3 Answers3

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From what I understand, most dialects work as you describe: you = singular and y'all = plural.

There is some controversy over whether some dialects have extended this further, such that y'all = singular and "all y'all" = plural.

Here is a discussion over at Language Log, where they say that there is a lot of disagreement about this. I think the overall sense from this article is that people have anecdotes and random quotes where people use y'all as a singular, but no person from the South who attests that "yes, this is what I do."

And here is a followup discussion. Here there is a similar type of disconnect between anecdote and speaker intuition. There seems to be mention that in Oklahoma, y'all can be used for singular and plural, which, if true, might be fueling a false conclusion about "all y'all" being the plural of singular y'all.

There is a lot more in there, and it is worth a read for anyone interested, but the last thing I wanted to mention was this hypothesis at the end of that page:

Thomas Nunnally (1994) has offered a second hypothesis for the emergence of yall as a singular. He suggests that it may well be expanding to fill the role of a polite singular, just as you did several centuries ago. He points out that many of the citations of yall-singular show the form occurring at the edges of discourse-in greetings, partings, and so forth. The following citation, provided to us by Robin Sabino (1994), certainly fulfills this function. Sabino overheard an African-American waitress in an Opelika, Alabama, restaurant say to a customer eating alone, "How are you-all's grits?"

All of this may seem strange, but if you look at the origin of you itself, the same thing happened: it used to be that thou/thee was 2nd person singular and ye/you was 2nd person plural, but as we know, plural you became the 2nd person pronoun for singular and plural (in Standard English, at least). So these kinds of shifts are possible.

Note: This has been extensively edited in light of some research I found over at Language Log.

Kosmonaut
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  • How are these dialects separated? Is it an east-west thing? – Chris Cudmore Jan 06 '11 at 19:58
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    And sometimes: "you" strictly singular, "y'all" inclusive or indeterminate, and "all y'all" definitively plural (and possibly indicating that each and every person so addressed in included while plain "y'all" may allow for exceptions). – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Jan 06 '11 at 20:13
  • @dmckee: Ah, that is interesting too! – Kosmonaut Jan 06 '11 at 20:47
  • @chris: I wish I could find a paper that discusses this, but so far I haven't. I'd like to know myself. I can say that my wife's southern Georgia area dialect is the normal you/y'all type. – Kosmonaut Jan 06 '11 at 20:55
  • @Kosmonaut: Not something written anywhere, but that seemed to be the usage in the part of South Texas I grew up in. Though, like you said it seems to be regional, different interpretations seemed to apply in Tidewater (Virginia) and central Alabama. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Jan 06 '11 at 21:14
  • @dmckee, @chris, @Dusty: I found some real discussion of the phenomenon that I recommend you all check out. I've added the links into my answer. – Kosmonaut Jan 06 '11 at 21:19
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    @Kosmonaut: I knew a guy in college who was from Arkansas who rarely (if ever) said "Y'all" by itself, but routinely said, "All y'all," to speak to a group of people, as in, "Are all y'all going to the football game this weekend?" What's more, the two words were pronounced as if they were one. – Scott Mitchell Jan 06 '11 at 23:14
  • @Scott Mitchell - Just one of those "redneck words"; "D'ja eat yet?" "Naw, d'jew?" "Yaunto"? Southern dialects are full of elisions, dipthongs, tripthongs and "quadripthongs" that all fall under the general heading of "twang". – KeithS Jun 14 '11 at 16:39
  • @Scott Mitchell - Yup. Here in Okie land, you will hear the occasional "all y'all" (in referring to the totality of a largish group). However, I think we use it as an actual contraction (slurring of the pause between "you" and "all"), unlike in the true South where it is pretty much a stand-alone word. – T.E.D. Jun 14 '11 at 17:07
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This is the way I always explain it. You is singular. "Are you going to lunch after church?"meaning you yourself, singular. Y'all is plural. "Are y'all going to lunch after church? meaning is any of your group going. All y'all is what I call plural inclusive. "Are all y'all going to lunch after church?"meaning is every single last one of your group going. Important details when you need a head count to reserve a table.

Alice
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  • Welcome to EL&U. Your answer has already been posted by another user and doesn't provide any additional information. Please take the tour and visit our help center for additional guidance. –  Jan 04 '16 at 12:59
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    I think this is a fine explanation by a native speaker who actually uses this expression herself. It is what I call first-hand experience, which will always beat hands-down a Wikipedia answer. The OP asks what is the "correct usage", as a native speaker, Alice has defined that. – Mari-Lou A Jan 05 '16 at 13:49
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"Y'all" was originally coined as a contraction of "you all" and thus was originally used as the second-person plural pronoun, comparable to "ustedes" in Spanish and "vous" in French. It fills a void in the English language as compared to Latin languages and even German, which all have at least one second-person plural pronoun. Classically, "you" has had both the singular and plural roles, and if a distinction had to be made, the phrase "all of you" or "you all" is correct for the plural. The dual meaning is likely French in origin; the pronoun "vous" in French, in addition to being the general second-person plural, is also used as a polite second-person singular. It's an artifact of culture, particularly high culture, similar to the "royal 'we'". The term carries into English through a combination of English's beginnings in French and also through off-and-on English obsessions with French culture throughout history.

Its usage as a singular, if one has to try to make the shoe fit, may come from a mingling of English-derived Deep South and French-influenced Creole/Cajun cultures. "Y'all" may have come into common use through Creole adaptation of the term to replace both of the uses of the French counterpart "vous".

Now, IMO that's stuffing the shoe on the wrong foot. Vernacular speech, no matter the language, is full of "common-use" grammar errors. As a native Okie and naturalized Texan, IMO the use of "y'all" as anything other than a contraction of "you all" is more of the same.

KeithS
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    English does not have its beginnings in French. English and German are both from the Germanic language branch, while the Romance languages belong to the Italic language branch. – Kosmonaut Jun 14 '11 at 17:25
  • English as we know it is an amalgam of early German and French dialects; the Saxon occupants of the British Isles were invaded and occupied by the Normans from the Continent, and many aspects of what we now consider English culture, including language, are French-influenced. The influence continued as French became a popular court language in Europe during the Renaissance and Classical periods. For instance, take the word "house"; it's root is the German "haus". However, the word "mansion" is rooted in the French "maison". English is full of similar examples. – KeithS Jun 14 '11 at 17:44
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    "English as we know it is an amalgam of early German and French dialects" — this isn't true. German and English both share a common ancestor, but English didn't come from German at all — they both sprang from Proto-Germanic, as did the Scandinavian languages, Dutch, and so on. By the time French began influencing the English lexicon (as a result of the Norman Conquest in 1066), English had already existed for about 600 years (and Proto-Germanic for thousands of years before that). – Kosmonaut Jun 14 '11 at 18:07
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    The influence of French is almost exclusively vocabulary — about 30% of it was borrowed, but then it was anglicized and assimilated into English (not the other way around). Furthermore, our syntax, phonology, and prosody has always been quite distinct from French. Contributing to the lexicon is the most superficial way of influencing a language. We can easily borrow words like karaoke, madrasa, and safari without having to have any fundamental link between English grammar and the grammars of these languages. – Kosmonaut Jun 14 '11 at 18:09
  • To add to this: much of the French and especially Latinate vocabulary that has been so characteristic of English was added much later than the Norman invasion, especially during the Renaissance. When other languages turned to their own roots and stems to build new vocabulary for the new age, English turned to Latin, Greek and some French. – siride Sep 09 '13 at 22:42
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    I would have thought a closer Spanish equivalent of y'all might be vosotros (you and others) rather than ustedes (your graces, a 3rd person construction). – Henry Jan 04 '16 at 11:39
  • @Henry Vosotros is only used in Spain. In other Hispanic countries, plural you is ustedes, formal or not. – user3932000 Sep 03 '16 at 03:17
  • I could not find the question, but someone clarified the origin of the French "vous" on the Latin StackExchange. I think that it was originally from "vos," in reference to two leaders (which I'm far too tired to recall) who were apart at times but were asked questions as two. It eventually became formal "you singular" when it entered some other weird languages, as the position of the two leaders was of course quite high. – Middle School Historian May 18 '17 at 13:27