Comment by thechao
14 hours ago
You, y'all (small close group), y'all all (larger, further group), and "all y'all" — Southeast Texas (coastal) dialect form that showed up about 25 yrs ago. I suspect it might've been there all along, but only became acceptable at that point?
Another 100+ years, and this'll be some solid grammar.
Don’t forget you’uns or yinz!
I struggled with this when I was a school teacher. English lacks a good way to clarify you are addressing a group vs one person, which comes up a lot in a classroom. “Class, you…” is clunky, “You guys…” has obvious issues, and y’all or any other contraction is generally considered bad grammar. I generally went with y’all. Kids would laugh about it, but that seemed to help get their attention.
Surely, you knew all of your students' names and if you were addressing one person, you could've used their name. Addressing the class as merely "class" seems adequate as well. I'm having a hard time thinking of a situation where you are forced to use "you" ambiguously.
What if you're addressing part of the class, though? Like "y'all in the back, you need to get back to your work".
3 replies →
“Now, chat, settle down.”
That has to be more than 25 years
I grew up in Houston saying all that in the 80s
Same here, frankly. I just didn't want to make an aggressive generalization that I couldn't support. I've got video of the usage from 2001.
It's probably closer to 250 years than 25.