page_title: Southern American English
section_title: Y'all
hierarchical_section_title: Southern American English / Vocabulary / Y'all
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of requency of both the terms "Y'all" and "You all"to refer to multiple people. Based off of Harvard survey. http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/states.html
context_page_description: Southern American English or Southern U.S. English is a regional dialect or collection of dialects of American English spoken throughout the Southern United States, though increasingly in more rural areas and primarily by White Southerners. Formal, much more recent terms within American linguistics include Southern White Vernacular English and Rural White Southern English.
  A regional Southern American English consolidated and expanded throughout all the traditional Southern States since the last quarter of the 19th century until around World War II, largely superseding the more diverse, older Southern American English dialects. This younger and more unified pronunciation system, popularly known in the United States as a Southern accent or simply Southern, now comprises the largest American regional accent group by number of speakers. The 2006 Atlas of North American English strongly reports a Southern accent in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Louisiana, as well as almost all of Texas, the Charleston area of West Virginia, the Springfield area of Missouri, and the Jacksonville area of Florida.
context_section_description: Y'all is a second person plural pronoun and the usual Southern plural form of the word you. It is originally a contraction – you all – which is used less frequently. This term originated with the modern Southern dialect region and is not found in older Southern dialects.
  When addressing a group, y'all is general (I know y'all)  and is used to address the group as a whole, whereas all y'all is used to emphasize specificity of each and every member of the group ("I know all y'all.") The possessive form of Y'all is created by adding the standard "-'s".
  "I've got y'all's assignments here."  /jɔlz/
  Y'all is distinctly separate from the singular you.  The statement "I gave y'all my truck payment last week," is more precise than "I gave you my truck payment last week."   You (if interpreted as singular) could imply the payment was given directly to the person being spoken to – when that may not be the case.
  "All y'all" is used to specify that all members of the second person plural (i.e., all persons currently being addressed and/or all members of a group represented by an addressee) are included; that is, it operates in contradistinction to "some of y'all", thereby functioning similarly to "all of you" in standard English.
  In rural southern Appalachia an "n" is added to pronouns indicating "one" "his'n" "his one" "her'n" "her one" "Yor'n" "your one" i.e. "his, hers and yours". Another example is yernses. It may be substituted for the 2nd person plural possessive yours.
  "That book is yernses." /ˈjɜrnzəz/
caption: Frequency of either "Y'all" or "You all" to address multiple people, according to an Internet survey of American dialect variation.[85]
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