Saturday, November 14, 2015

Y'all Won't Believe This

Like many other Texans, one of my favorite words is "y'all." "Y'all" does a marvelous job of functioning as a second person plural pronoun for a language that lost its second person plural pronoun centuries ago. Strangely enough, the word "y'all" is also used in South African Indian English, although the Southern US and South African Indian cultures arrived at the word "y'all" independently.  



     Here is an article in The Economist discussing this handy word:



    This article in Slate addresses the history of English's second person pronoun:

 

No comments:

Post a Comment