Why English needs “y’all”

English is a weird language for a lot of reasons, but today I want to talk about why English doesn’t have a standard plural for you.

Prefer a video version of this post? Watch here!

In the U.S., the South generally says y’all, while the rest of the country generally says you guys:

But this papers over a lot of regional variation. 10% of the country uses you for both singular and plural, another 10% use you all, yous/youse is common in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and Pittsburgh lays claim to yinz (a shortening from you ones).

(These awesome maps are from the book Speaking American: How y’all, youse, and you guys talk: A visual guide, by Joshua Katz. You can read my review of the book below.)

Speaking American: How y’all, youse, and you guys talk

A beautiful and engaging coffee table book of 122 dialect maps showing how different regions of the U.S. say different things. A wonderful illustration of dialect diversity in the United States, this book is sure to spark great conversations. A must-have for any language lover.

Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.

So why all the variation? Well, English used to have a plural you—and that word was…you.

The word you was originally plural, not singular. Before that, the singular was thou (for subjects), thee (for objects), or thy/thine (for possessives).

The reason you became singular is actually due to French. In French tu means ‘you (sg.)’ and vous means ‘you (pl.)’, but vous is also used for politeness, as a form of respect. After the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, French had a huge influence on the English language. So English speakers started borrowing that pattern into English and using you as a polite way to address one person, and eventually that just became the default way of addressing one person, and it was no longer used to address multiple people.

What’s cool is that the verb be got pulled along with it into the singular too. So it used to be this is how you’d conjugate the verb be:

Notice how the plural is always are. Well that plural verb got pulled along into the singular too, and now it looks like this:

But of course this created a gap, and ever since then English speakers have been trying to settle on a new way of saying ‘you (pl.)’.

And that, in a nutshell, is why English needed to create y’all in the first place!