One of the first things I noticed when learning a foreign language for the first time was that there is no functional second person plural in English. Most languages have solid, distinct ways of addressing a group, but English only has "you," which is identical to the singular second person pronoun.
If you were to walk into a room full of people and use the correct grammar to invite them to the mall, you would say "Do you want to come to the mall?" The likely response would be people saying "Wait, which one of us?"
You'd probably say "Do YOU GUYS want to come to the mall," or something to that effect.
When I found out that other languages got to have a way to talk to groups of people, and my native language didn't, I became frustrated. It's a pretty important pronoun to just chalk up to English being wonky.
I approached some friends of mine who are linguists about the silliness of English's shitty second person plural, and they told me that the word "Y'all" was being adopted by a lot of intelligent people for this very reason. Most accepted contractions that we take for granted today started as slang ("I'll," "would've," "you'd," "We're"), so it seemed fairly natural that "y'all" could be adopted to fill this gaping hole in the English language.
The argument for "y'all" is that it's a legitimate contraction of "you all." There is a apostrophe in the proper place and it fits into sentence structure nicely and everything! The thing that sets it apart from other slang like "ain't" is that it is made from real words with correct syntax. "Do you all want to come to the mall?" Is a perfect sentence, so "Do y'all want to come to the mall?" Should also be correct.
So partially to ease the confusion of switching between languages every day, but mostly because I found it interesting, I adopted "y'all" into my vocabulary.
On the one hand, it is EXTREMELY useful in avoiding confusion. I can walk into a room, make eye contact with my buddy and say "Are you coming to the midnight release of Portal 2?" Or look a group and say "Are y'all coming to the midnight release of Portal 2?" and there is never any doubt who I am addressing.
On the other hand, most people who I don't know react by looking at me like I'm some kind of hillbilly and asking me what the hell is wrong with me.
One guy even said "Whull ah dunno, Billy-Jo! 'Re we'uns gon' t' leave righ now? *hyuk*"
I think there is a legitimately useful word that could be a part of English, but most people say there is too much of a redneck stigma attached to it.
What do y'all think?
EDIT: I didn't actually mean to write "ya'll." I fixed my wandering apostrophes throughout the OP.
If you were to walk into a room full of people and use the correct grammar to invite them to the mall, you would say "Do you want to come to the mall?" The likely response would be people saying "Wait, which one of us?"
You'd probably say "Do YOU GUYS want to come to the mall," or something to that effect.
When I found out that other languages got to have a way to talk to groups of people, and my native language didn't, I became frustrated. It's a pretty important pronoun to just chalk up to English being wonky.
I approached some friends of mine who are linguists about the silliness of English's shitty second person plural, and they told me that the word "Y'all" was being adopted by a lot of intelligent people for this very reason. Most accepted contractions that we take for granted today started as slang ("I'll," "would've," "you'd," "We're"), so it seemed fairly natural that "y'all" could be adopted to fill this gaping hole in the English language.
The argument for "y'all" is that it's a legitimate contraction of "you all." There is a apostrophe in the proper place and it fits into sentence structure nicely and everything! The thing that sets it apart from other slang like "ain't" is that it is made from real words with correct syntax. "Do you all want to come to the mall?" Is a perfect sentence, so "Do y'all want to come to the mall?" Should also be correct.
So partially to ease the confusion of switching between languages every day, but mostly because I found it interesting, I adopted "y'all" into my vocabulary.
On the one hand, it is EXTREMELY useful in avoiding confusion. I can walk into a room, make eye contact with my buddy and say "Are you coming to the midnight release of Portal 2?" Or look a group and say "Are y'all coming to the midnight release of Portal 2?" and there is never any doubt who I am addressing.
On the other hand, most people who I don't know react by looking at me like I'm some kind of hillbilly and asking me what the hell is wrong with me.
One guy even said "Whull ah dunno, Billy-Jo! 'Re we'uns gon' t' leave righ now? *hyuk*"
I think there is a legitimately useful word that could be a part of English, but most people say there is too much of a redneck stigma attached to it.
What do y'all think?
EDIT: I didn't actually mean to write "ya'll." I fixed my wandering apostrophes throughout the OP.
