Y'all

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Osbri

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Is "y'all" wrong to say? I ask this because I heard Piscean say it is.
 
Osbri said:
Is "y'all" wrong to say? I ask this because I heard Piscean say it is.
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It's not standard in BrE. It's AmE terminology. I'm sure one of our AmE speakers will tell us how formal/informal it is.
 
Or should I say everybody/everybody here?
 
Y'all is not standard AmE either. It is dialect and is used primarily in the southern states. I consider it to be highly informal.
 
In addition, I was not aware that UE had an audio version. ;-)
 
Osbri said:
Is "y'all" wrong to say? I ask this because I heard Piscean say it is.
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He was almost certainly using it light-heartedly as we don't use it in British English.
 
I am half Southern and I say it all the time.
In Pittsburgh, they say "yins."
In New York, they say "youze guys."
I've seen some British speakers say "You lot" would be a comparable use.
We all have our little foibles for how we say "you" to more than one person. Sometimes we would only say it very informally and sometimes it's so ingrained our speech patterns that we don't even notice.
 
Tdol said:
He was almost certainly using it light-heartedly as we don't use it in British English.
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You made the same error that I did when reading the first post. I thought it said "... I heard Piscean say it". I posted a response and then deleted it because I realised that it actually says "... I heard Piscean say it is [wrong]".
 
MikeNewYork said:
Y'all is not standard AmE either. It is dialect and is used primarily in the southern states. I consider it to be highly informal.
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So is it wrong or "unprofessional" to say that word?

Piscean said:
I am sure you never heard me say that. Can you provide a link to the thread in which I commented on y'all​, please?
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Oh, I saw you write that.

Piscean said:
In the absence of a response, I searched the y'all posts. The only one I could find with a comment from me was this one. In it, I wrote to a person who frequently used y'all "Please use standard English forms in this forum".

Please don't claim I've said things I haven't, Osbri.
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Sorry, I thought you meant it was wrong to say that.

Barb_D said:
I am half Southern and I say it all the time.
In Pittsburgh, they say "yins."
In New York, they say "youze guys."
I've seen some British speakers say "You lot" would be a comparable use.
We all have our little foibles for how we say "you" to more than one person. Sometimes we would only say it very informally and sometimes it's so ingrained our speech patterns that we don't even notice.
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I never heard "youze guys" in New York but I did hear "you guys" or "y'all".
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Instead of saying "Y'all", should I say "everybody" or "everybody here"?
 
You can say "all of you."
 
Y'all is usually but not necessarily plural. This is proven by the fact that it has its own plural: all y'all.
 
I never heard "youze guys" in New York but I did hear "you guys" or "y'all".
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Youze quys extends far beyond New York. It was standard colloquial usage when I was growing up in Toronto almost 70 years ago.
 
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Osbri said:
So is it wrong or "unprofessional" to say that word?
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It's a dialect form. It's fine in the dialect, but the wider community don't use it. If you're living among speakers of the dialect, use it, but beyond that, leave it to them.
 
In Texas they say y'all. I don't hear it around here (Charlotte) much.
 
I don't know why but I use it all the time when I say "you" to more than one person. I have no idea where I did get that thing from but in fact it definitely stuck in my mind. :roll:

P.S I mean I go for "y'all" in informal situations. ;-)

Not a teacher nor a native speaker.
 
You're not alone. Until I heard otherwise on this forum, I assumed "y'all" only referred to multiple people being addressed as a group. I thought it was short for "you all" or "all of you". I still can't really see how it works when addressing a single person. ;-)
 
It's one of those American colloquialisms that we just have to accept with equanimity.

Another of them which doesn't seem to have crossed the Atlantic yet is 'He's good people'.
 
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emsr2d2 said:
You're not alone. Until I heard otherwise on this forum, I assumed "y'all" only referred to multiple people being addressed as a group. I thought it was short for "you all" or "all of you". I still can't really see how it works when addressing a single person. ;-)
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I wouldn't use "y'all" for a single person. It is derived from "you all."

But, I'm a Yankee, so I'm no expert on its use. It really does come in handy in informal situations. Better than the mystifying (to outsiders) yinz/yunz from my dialect that Barb mentioned above. I don't use that very often, and certainly not in professional settings. That is supposedly derived from "you ones."
 
It's very non-standard in most of North America. I can't say the geographical bounds with certainty, but it's generally where the Confederate flag used to fly that people saw the need for an explicitly plural pronoun.
 
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