The English language is a remarkable and unwieldy beast. It lacks the musicality of French or Italian and the precision of German. It doesn’t, as The New York Times explored in a column published yesterday, even possess a natural word for the second person plural. Spanish has ustedes and vosotros, French has vous, Italian has voi, Mandarin has nimen, and English has . . . well, therein lies the problem. As linguist John McWhorter noted in the column, for want of such a word, English speakers have spent much of the past several decades transforming “you guys” into a gender-neutral term to fill the void. It’s an interesting linguistic analysis—and one that is entirely unnecessary in Texas, or throughout the South. We’ve long had a word that serves this exact purpose, with no gender implications and a (if we do say so ourselves) mellifluous cadence. We’re talking about “y’all,” y’all.
The Times column waves “y’all” away as an option, describing the word as “much too slangy, regional or”—in a sentiment both cringe-inducing and puzzling—“what you might even call ethnic” to be adopted by English speakers the world over. And while we are ourselves often protective of seeing aspects of our culture claimed by our Yankee brethren (we’re still mad about the whole “peas in guac” thing), Texans have long been magnanimous about sharing “y’all” with Northerners. It’s simply too useful a word to deny our fellow Americans simply because they had the misfortune to be born in New York or Massachusetts.
That “y’all” has unmatched utility can hardly be subject to debate. One doesn’t need to argue over whether “guys” is now gender-neutral if a way to address a group of people that does not include the speaker already exists. And while the cohort to which “guys” reads as inherently gendered may be fading, it is still here with us, and heaven help anyone who refers to a woman in her seventies as a “guy” in front of her face. (During a sojourn in Chicago, this author would often serve as a volunteer usher at the Steppenwolf Theatre in exchange for free tickets, usually as the youngest member of the group by several decades. The theater’s volunteer coordinator, a brash New Yorker, explained that he’d adopted “y’all” with theatergoers after learning firsthand how “you guys” was received by members of the Guys and Dolls generation.)
“You guys” at least has the benefit of linguistic familiarity (“Hey, you guuuuys!”), but every other suggestion reads as a self-conscious attempt to avoid a more common construction: “You folks” is no more formal than “you guys,” but it’s much more awkward. “You all” plays to the ear as a deliberate decision to reject “y’all,” rendering the phrase distracting to a listener who is given an inadvertent glimpse into the speaker’s psyche. “You people?” Yikes. The column doesn’t even consider truly regional terms like “youse” or “yinz,” and with good reason. McWhorter concludes that “you guys” is the least worst option.
Despite the Times’ dismissal of “y’all,” though, there’s evidence that the word’s utility supersedes its, uh, “ethnic” implications. It’s not just us saying this, either; why, back in 2022, that very same northeastern regional newspaper published an essay by the Dallas-born writer Maud Newton in which Newton detailed her own journey from rejecting “y’all” to embracing it. When she moved to Brooklyn, she discovered that “far from being a niche Southern phrase, [‘y’all’] already had a home here,” and that she had come to embrace it. “Far from the oppressive ethos I once imagined, ‘y’all’ represents the best of American vernacular,” Newton wrote.
Newton is hardly the first Northerner to declare that it’s time to embrace “y’all.” In 2019, Philadelphia magazine urged readers to abandon “youse” for “y’all” (“It’s a warm hug inviting you in and genuinely hoping you stay a while”). Dictionary.com suggested it near the top of its list of gender-netural “you guys” substitutes, behind only the confusing plural “you,” which is indistinguishable from the singular “you” except by context.
None of this is brand-new. More than twenty years ago, Guy Bailey—a linguist who currently serves as president of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and then worked at UT’s San Antonio campus—coauthored “The Nationalization of a Southernism,” a paper about the word’s spread that was published in a 2000 edition of the Journal of English Linguistics. Bailey’s research found that “y’all” was already widely used outside Texas and the South, and that younger Americans in those non-Southern parts of the country were much more likely to use “y’all” than their older counterparts. And the BBC—an unlikely source of information about “y’all”—noted in a 2022 story the word’s proliferation not just in the U.S. but across the English-speaking world. “Y’all” has been in use around the nation within certain demographics since the Great Migration, the period from around 1910 through the early 1970s during which millions of Black Americans from the South moved to the North, Midwest, and West.
If the sprawl of “y’all” has been ongoing for decades, why is the Times now publishing a column denigrating it as provincial and encouraging the long-out-of-favor “you guys”? It may simply be that McWhorter is fulfilling his role as a proud contrarian, and that the paper generally enjoys being a little bit condescending to those of us from outside of its region of influence. But one could also reasonably conclude that it’s the widespread—and still growing—acceptance of “y’all” as a universal term that makes some Northerners seek an alternative. That also wouldn’t be new; just last year, Chicago magazine published a paean to “youse,” arguing that it just sounds more natural coming out of the mouths of “white ethnic Chicagoan[s]” (read: likely Irish, Italian, and Polish) than “y’all.”
In an era in which regional differences are increasingly erased in favor of the accelerated monoculture brought on by the internet—teens are more likely to talk like their favorite influencers, wherever they may be from, than the olds who live down the block—there’s something charming about trying to protect “youse” and “yinz” from the encroachment of “y’all” (though we’re less sentimental about “you guys”). Still, the word is simply too useful for us to keep it for ourselves. There’s no need to resist “y’all.” It’s an inviting word. Y’all are welcome to use it.
