Y’all was created to serve a completely artificial problem.
English has second person singular pronouns, but for some dumbfuck reason we’ve deprecated them. It’s still maintained in the standard for compatibility with legacy literature but not recommended for new works. If thou talk’st this way, thy speech comes off as archaic/shakesperian/biblical. So we use the second person plural for everything. But this removes the ability to encode context on how many thou art addressing. “You! Go put that fire out.” Are you talking to an individual in a group or the whole group?
So the American south turned “you” into the singular form and invented “you all” contracted to “y’all” for the plural form.
Now we just need to fix the first person plural problem, ie “We’ve just won the lottery!” Does “we” include the listener, or not? English doesn’t encode that information; “we” don’t have different words for “myself the speaker and the listener(s) and perhaps others” and “Myself the speaker, others, but not the listener.”
Y’all was created to serve a completely artificial problem.
English has second person singular pronouns, but for some dumbfuck reason we’ve deprecated them. It’s still maintained in the standard for compatibility with legacy literature but not recommended for new works. If thou talk’st this way, thy speech comes off as archaic/shakesperian/biblical. So we use the second person plural for everything. But this removes the ability to encode context on how many thou art addressing. “You! Go put that fire out.” Are you talking to an individual in a group or the whole group?
So the American south turned “you” into the singular form and invented “you all” contracted to “y’all” for the plural form.
Now we just need to fix the first person plural problem, ie “We’ve just won the lottery!” Does “we” include the listener, or not? English doesn’t encode that information; “we” don’t have different words for “myself the speaker and the listener(s) and perhaps others” and “Myself the speaker, others, but not the listener.”
M’y’all and m’y’ain’t
Ah, compound contractions. Yeah that’ll work. We’ve already got y’all’ve and y’all’d’a.
Can’t forget about y’all’dnt’ve.
The first person plural of we is we’uns.
heard many you-uns growing up around the south.