I’m not American, so I remember discovering about this word a few years ago, and that it was a word mostly used in the South and by black Americans. But now, I see this word being used everywhere on Reddit, by Europeans, Canadians, even Singaporeans of all places. How do people from the South feel about it?
44 comments
Ain’t an issue with this southerner. It’s a useful word.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I love it. I’ve been preaching the greatness of “y’all” for probably 15 years now. It’s useful and imo elegant. Something the South can be proud of creating.
Glad to see the world using it, but I don’t use it myself.
It’s a useful word. I’m okay with it spreading.
I love seeing all’a’yall using it
It shows how vast our influence is. y’all are welcome.
My only problem with it is seeing y’all spelled wrong. It’s a contraction of you all.
It’s a great word. People should have been using it for decades.
It’s short, gender neutral, and has multiple uses.
I’m glad to see it.
Not a southerner but when is recently? Seems like it’s been common forever.
It’s an obvious affectation which makes it kind of goofy to my ear but, it’s whatever
I grew up on the edge of the south where there were a lot of people who didn’t have southern accents, but would still try to use words like y’all to sound southern and country, despite growing up in the suburbs. So nowadays whenever I hear people say y’all without the rest of the accent my first thought is they’re trying to hard to be faux southern.
I don’t agree that it’s mostly used by black Americans, I haven’t see that at all.
I’m glad. It’s much more convenient and I’m glad to be understood anywhere I use it.
Have a good day y’all
I’m a northerner who uses yall. It’s shorter and easier to say than you all, and it also declares that it is a moment of brevity rather then urgency
I wouldnt say it recently became popular, but definitely within my lifetime it’s gone from people laughing when they hear me say it to common place and barely noticed.
As for why, again my perspective, Jeff Foxworthy and George W.Bush as well as the explosion of the internet in the mid-late 90s and early 00s.
Foxworthy is a comedian whose best known schtick is “You might be a redneck”, Bush desperateley (and awkwardly) tried to play up his “country” roots and I think the internet is self-explanatory.
Just a perfect storm that brought y’all into wider use.
My off the cuff opinion and analysis, don’t take it seriously y’all.
As long as I don’t see any of yous writing it “ya’ll”, we won’t have a problem.
Use it. Learn proper usage of “all y’all,” though. Y’all butcher it
Also, yall’d’ve already been using it already if y’all’d listened.
Dear god, I hope you are all ok with it. I’ve been campaigning for it’s usage ever since I spent a year in school in Baltimore.
Everyone I know (in the northeast) uses “you guys” when speaking casually.
It’s a necessity word, you need a plural you.
It’s alright with me. It’s a good all inclusive word.
A little annoyed but also vindicated. I told you it was a good word!
It’s a useful word. It makes sense that it has gained broader usage.
That’s kind of how language works. A word, phrase, pronunciation, etc. spreads because people find it makes sense for how they use it.
Not from the south, but I spent a considerable amount of time there growing up. I’m mostly excited to see how far we can take the contractions. So far my best (actually used in conversation) is “you all would have” which came out to the abomination of “y’all’d’ve”
It’s the natural order. I’ve heard brits use it. But I’ve also heard us use yalls slang.
I don’t give two shits.
I am a southerner in the Midwest. it makes me so happy.
I don’t live in the south now but I grew up in Appalachia where y’all is an extremely common word.
I’m not really sure I’d say it’s widespread. Here in the Midwest it isn’t something that I hear regularly at all. Usually when I do it’s from someone who isn’t from here like me. I only really see it on TV or the movies if the characters are southern too.
Reddit also has a hate boner for people living in suburbs, driving and all kinds of things people don’t IRL. So seeing something used here more often isn’t exactly proof it’s used much in the real world.
I think it fills a need in the English language though. A way to address a group of people easily with just one word.
A replacement was needed for “ye” (plural second person), and we Southerners came up with the coolest one.
Gender neutral plural you. Great addition to the English language
I’m good with it! I’m waiting on “yonder” to take hold…again.
It’s great. English lacks a second-person plural pronoun, so in my opinion “Y’all” is necessary and should be used by everyone.
Fun fact: y’all is the only pronoun in the English language that is both second person and plural
as long as y’all don’t spell it ya’ll we’re all good
I’m all for it. Y’all finally stopped making fun of us for saying y’all.
It’s OK with me, so long as it is not used to refer to one person.
Some of my coworkers from the north use it more than me, but I wonder where they got it from. I had never/rarely heard the term until I moved to the deep south, but now it’s really widespread.
One of my favorite things online is seeing some European being all smug about something and hating on America, saying it has no culture, and then using a highly American word like “ya’ll”
Don’t use it if you also use southern drawl to imitate an ignorant person.
Y’all should just give in and start using y’all. Youse guys is acceptable too.
All y’all is perfection.
> I’m not American, so I remember discovering about this word a few years ago, and that it was a word mostly used in the South and by black Americans.
Gonna get on a soapbox for this. First, I don’t consider myself a *Southerner*. I was born in NY and grew up in Central FL, so it’s not my word. But was there from when Hillsborough was largely rural and Pasco might as well have been Inverness all the way until COVID.
Second, most of my life has been spent in the South, living and working with Southerners, and I know fully how they’ve been treated – culturally – by America in that time. The image of the *working class* ‘Southerner’ in most of the world’s head at this point isn’t positive, Black or White. Cleetus the Slack Jawed Yokel, drooling backwoods hillbillies affected with hookworm, sun baked, under-educated, and quick to threaten violence. Yes, the South has a ton of problems and I will fully agree with almost all of them, but as a region it’s a kaleidoscope of melting pot cultures and isolated enclaves taking bits and piece of Scots, Irish, English, French, African, Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and Native cultures. People from around the US still picture Forest Gump, and it sucks.
That being said, I have a massive issue with a lot of the people who freely use y’all in the last 10 years for two reasons that largely boil down to seeing it’s common use now as a result of classism;
1) A lot of the people I’ve talked to who’ve started adopting it are Millennials and Zoomers who are often well meaning and socially conscious. I get the sense that they, like pretty much every other generation since the dawn of the 20th century, are openly adopting Black cultural customs because they think it’s cool. Those same people are often open in their disdain for working class Southern Whites, freely tossing out shit like ‘Roll Tide’ to imply inbreeding while actively adopting parts of working class southern culture either ironically (“Raise Hell and praise Dale!”) or because they’re ignorant of it’s roots (that is, “y’all” by all accounts developed across racial lines).
2) I promise you that if you feel as though you’ve never heard a Southerner use ‘y’all’ in conversation before the last few years it’s because they were actively code switching to avoid the negative connotations of *being* a Southerner. A lot of people appear to be used to the word now because of Twitter, where presumably the user is talking to their specific in-group and ambivalent to observers ‘listening in’. It bums me out that a lot of Black and White southerners had to work hard for years to mask their Southerness only to have a word core to their culture carried off on a wave of Tweets.
What’s next? Yinz? Youse? You-uns?
Anyway, not my word, but I judge the fuck out of upper class white people from around the country who throw it around.
FINALLY!!!!!!
Most Southerners don’t mind y’all saying it. I’m kind of mixed, tbh. I remember when non-Southerners would ridicule us for saying “y’all”.
If you said that word outside of the South back in the day, then you would be called racist, uneducated, ignorant, redneck, etc. Now, all of a sudden, everybody uses it. Now, when I hear other people saying it, I often get the impression that they’re being sardonic and using it cheekily to mock Southerners. I don’t get offended by it, but it usually leaves me wondering what their intentions are by saying it.
Non-Southerners have a historical love-hate relationship with the South. On one hand, we’re by far the most culturally influential region of the U.S. and they’ve been imitating our cultural customs for well over a century. On the other hand, many non-Southerners hate us and even go so far as to wish death on us because of our history or current political majority.
Every time a natural disaster strikes the South, non-Southerners come out of the woodworks to say the people who died deserved it. I saw this when an EF4 tornado struck my community and some of my good friends died, I saw this when Texas had that bad ice storm and I saw this every time a hurricane hits the coastal South. At the same time, they’ll happily sip their Coca Cola, listen to Rock/Blues/Country/Jazz music and eat food that non-Southerners adopted from us. They’ve been ripping off our customs while simultaneously berating us for a very long time. The use of our word, “y’all,” is no different. Just because they like to bite off of our style doesn’t mean they like us.
I don’t think anything has changed about it recently. It’s migrated with AAVE to some extent. But it’s hardly standard, even after all this time.