Ya'll vs Y'all Rant

[Niniva]

Okay, I get that y'all is prescriptively correct, in that the contraction is in this location.

However, assuming you are referring to the vernacular of the Southeastern United State, it isn't yuh-all; it's yawl. It has traditionally been spelled for this pronunciation, and the better spelling just grates because it ruins the pronunciation.

I realize that spelling is not the be-all-end-all of pronunciation; a name can be spelled Muckrucker and pronounced Abercrombie. Yet we all know that is absurd.

I simply feel that the spelling change is causing pronunciation confusion and essentially leading to people butchering my native vernacular, all for the sake of putting an apostrophe in the traditionally wrong but technically correct place.

...Which, imho, is a stupid reason to mess with something. You learn exceptions to the rules all the time in English, and ya'll needs to remain one of those exceptions.

Unless, of course, you actually mean yuh-all, which is spelled y'all and said by people who "ain't from around here."

 

[blacbird]

I have never, ever, seen "ya'll" used as the print rendering of this regional slangism. Ever. It's always been "y'all", and nobody literate in English misunderstands the pronunciation, any more than they would misunderstand how to pronounce any other of the galaxy of unphonetically-spelled English words like "knight" and "debt" and "gnome".

caw

 

[Ari Meermans]

Y'all is the contraction for you all. The apostrophe replaces the missing 'ou' in you.

 

[Williebee]

Ya'll are funnin' right?

I've used both. But, west of Athens, out in Texas, I grew up seeing it as both Ya'll and Y'all.

 

[eparadysz]

But you don't pronounce an apostrophe anyway, do you? I thought that was the point. In this example, I'd pronounce ya'll and y'all exactly the same way.

 

[backslashbaby]

Girl! Where're you gettin' ya'll from? 'Round these parts it's y'all; always has been, always will be And there always will be the word y'all, red eye gravy, and the good linen on Sundays

 

[Xelebes]

I don't know what ye're talking about.

 

[Matera the Mad]

This is the first time in my life (and it's been a long life of reading) that I have ever seen "ya'll" (as far as I can recall) and it just looks so wrong! I would read that as a contraction of "ya will," not "you + all." Ugh! Squick!

 

[auriel]

I don't know what ye're talking about.

I just burst out laughing at my desk at work. So thank you.

Honestly I have seen y'all written so much in my life that either version works for me. But then I also hear this word on a daily basis (unfortunately) so my sense of normal may be skewed. I'd go with y'all just because it's the gramatically correct version, because either way I'm going to know how to pronounce it.

 

[Williebee]

But you don't pronounce an apostrophe anyway, do you? I thought that was the point. In this example, I'd pronounce ya'll and y'all exactly the same way.

yup.

 

[Maryn]

I no longer live in Texas, but I cannot condone ya'll at all, for the reason Ari said.

Maryn, who spent a good five years losing y'all

 

[Williebee]

You never lose it. It slips back in when you aren't paying attention.

 

[F.E.]

I kinda thought "y'all" to be the formal for "ya'll", if ya know what I mean. *shrugs*

 

[absitinvidia]

Um, no.

Y'all is prounounced yawl, because the "y" is kinda swallowed and the stress is on the "all".

Ya'll is pronounced yull, as it's the extremely colloquial contraction for "ya will" and the "a" reduces to schwa because we're lazy when we speak.

(as an example, say "you'll see it when you get there." many people won't say "yewl" here, they'll say "yull". if you want to write that down, it's "ya'll")

There's a reason you don't often see ya'll in print, and when you do, there's a better than 99% chance that it's an error.

 

[MattW]

Yuns don't know what youse talking about.

 

[thothguard51]

Having lived in Virginia, Alabama, Georgia and Florida, its y'll, yaw the way...

 

[zahra]

Um, no.

Y'all is prounounced yawl, because the "y" is kinda swallowed and the stress is on the "all".

Ya'll is pronounced yull, as it's the extremely colloquial contraction for "ya will" and the "a" reduces to schwa because we're lazy when we speak.

(as an example, say "you'll see it when you get there." many people won't say "yewl" here, they'll say "yull". if you want to write that down, it's "ya'll")

There's a reason you don't often see ya'll in print, and when you do, there's a better than 99% chance that it's an error.

If an English person might butt in, I agree. Surely 'y'all' means 'you all'; y'all (sorry, had to) can tell by the placing of the apostrophe. 'Ya'll' cannot mean 'you all'. It would just be an incredibly daft way to spell it, because it immediately comes across as a contraction for 'you will'.

Right, I'm off to eat crumpets and sew a sampler of the Queen.

 

[Williebee]

Checking in with feedback from a professor from Arkansas, (yeah, THIS is the kind of stuff we talk about around my house once the wine comes out ). She says there is no apostrophe, it is just "yall". Course she's an Irish historian from south Arkansas-- who speaks Gaelic, so her world is already a bit bent. (That is, to say, I disagree.)

 

[Susan Coffin]

In my book, "ya all" is correct. When hyphenated, I'm sure it's "ya'll," but I'm not sure.

 

[zahra]

In my book, "ya all" is correct. When hyphenated, I'm sure it's "ya'll," but I'm not sure.

Of course you're not sure. That'll be because you're wrong.

 

[Niniva]

It is a daft spelling; that's part of the point. Here, it is a contraction of ya all, but someone somewhere (presumably where schwa was never pronounced -er) recognized the daftness of contracting you all to ya'll and introduced y'all. Still, ya'll is no more daft than pronouncing Colonel as "kernal."

As much as it bothers other people that it is spelled wrong, it bothers me that they fixed it wrong. Okay, I'll cede to spelling it however Mark Twain did... He seems like the man most likely to use the MOST correct option. *goes off to look*

 

[Niniva]

And Twain used none of the three in Life on the Mississippi or Huck Finn... *le sigh* Any other suggestion on who would be definitive?

ETA: Okay, I have a strange feeling that this is local dialect and all three are correct for different locations, as I have seen all three used pretty freely. Since my interest is Southern Appalachian, which is quite different culturally from other parts of the Southeastern United States, I went to the dictionary for those terms by Michael Montgomery - which was as futile as anything else in this discussion. I have wrotewritten the author and am awaiting some reply.

Yes, dear curmudgeons, it is illiterate. It is a word of a person who has gone a summer without shoes, who hangs their (singular, before it was acceptable) warsh, and wears homespun and hand-sewn dresses. That is the point of it's existence.

I'm watching the word ye fade from the local vocabulary as other books replace The King James Bible for learning to read. I'm watching a death of my culture, and I can't say that I like it, but I definitely understand it. Any culture where you go to town once a month for supplies is going to die from loss of their youths, even if the women really were barefoot and pregnant. Heck, I never returned after college either.

 

[Jamesaritchie]

It's y'all. There is no sane version that's written as ya'll. It is, at best, illiterate, and no editor worth the title would ever let it pass.

It is appropriate to spell it "yawl", but the best rule of accent and dialect is to never spell phonetically unless it changes pronunciation. Since y'all and yawl are pronounced the same way, it's silly to use the phonetic version. It's as bad as writing "sez" when you mean "says".

 

[WriteMinded]

ETA: Since my interest is Southern Appalachian, which is quite different culturally from other parts of the Southeastern United States, I went to the dictionary for those terms by Michael Montgomery - which was as futile as anything else in this discussion. I have wrote the author and am awaiting some reply.

Yes, dear curmudgeons, it is illiterate. It is a word of a person who has gone a summer without shoes, who hangs their (singular, before it was acceptable) warsh, and wears homespun and hand-sewn dresses. That is the point of it's existence.

You have described my great-grandmother and my grandmother, too. Oklahomans, they were both teachers. They said y'all and they knew how to spell it right: y'all. They'd have written the author.

I must admit I have a hella time saying wash without the "r" thrown in. But gee, what can y'all expect from someone who's worn hand-sewn dresses?

 

[absitinvidia]

And Twain used none of the three in Life on the Mississippi or Huck Finn... *le sigh* Any other suggestion on who would be definitive?

Well, my dictionaries all say y'all. I'd say this isn't really open for debate*; the word IS spelled y'all. There is a usage note in a couple of the dictionaries saying that a variant is you-all (with hyphen).


* It's kind of like discussing whether an acceptable variant of "could've" is "could of" because that's how it sounds to people who don't understand the grammar.