"Y'all" is a plural form of "you." That's it. It makes no difference how many "yous" I'm referring to.
Example: "You Brits? Well, y'all are are always spelling things funny. Like 'colour' or 'Kimberley.'"
See how I just lumped millions of people into a y'all?
"All y'all" is a plural plural and is used when there might be y'all subsets within a population.
Example: I'm in a classroom with 30 students. They are divided into two groups for homework assignments.
"Group A -- y'all read chapter four and write an outline. Group B -- y'all read chapter five and do the outline. All y'all need to be ready to discuss chapter six tomorrow."
Fifteen students will outline chapter four. Fifteen students will outline chapter five. All thirty students will be ready to discuss chapter six.
Make sense?
The moral of the story: Don't trust non-native speakers to correct your grammar.
6 comments:
Totally brilliant post !! I loved it!
LOVE. IT.
Though dude? Y'all are spelling color wrong. It's COLOUR. I promise.
With love from your neighbour to the north! :)
And y'all is a contraction for you all. The o and u are dropped...they do not magically morph into an a. It bugs the snot out of me to see it as ya'll. :-)
Insti
LOL Donna. Your neighbors to the south disagree. ;-)
Great post PC!
LOL All my relatives are Sicilian and relatives on my dad's side settled in Mississippi. They then moved to PA. So basically I learned to say y'all and they all said it with an Italian accent lol.
It's funny, but the truth is, the English language lacks a word for second person plural. The reason people say ya'll is because there are not separate words for singular and plural. It's confusing. In Germany, the words are "du" for singular and "ihr" for plural. In Spanish (of the Americas) it's "tu" and "ustedes." Obviously, there is a need for two different words so that people know who you are talking about. I get so sick of all these English nerds and their rules. If using "you" for singular and plural made sense, people would do it. It doesn't though, and only the nerds are the ones who use "you" for both singular and plural, and I can guarantee you that it confuses the listener.
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