Anisa Khalifa: I don't know if you've noticed, but the word "y'all" is popping up everywhere.
(MONTAGE OF VARIOUS VOICES USING Y'ALL ON RADIO AND PODCASTS)
Anisa: For decades, linguists have noted that regional American accents are disappearing. That includes the long-stigmatized twang heard throughout large portions of the southern United States. But at the same time, use of this traditionally southern pronoun is rapidly spreading from Louisiana to London. English speakers are embracing y'all. And the reasons may surprise you. I'm Anisa Khalifa, and today on The Broadside: how the most southern of words has quietly conquered the English-speaking world.
Brody McCurdy is a linguist and research associate at NC State. For several years he studied the spread of the word y'all from its traditional home in the South. He likens its broad appeal to America's love affair with another Southerner — Dolly Parton.
Brody McCurdy: You know, both conservatives and liberals love her; queer and straight people love her. And what we see with the pronoun y'all, we see Southerners love y'all, non-Southerners do, are increasingly loving y'all. Yeah, Dolly Parton is the y'all of pronouns, and y'all is the Dolly Parton of pronouns.
Anisa: I love it. What initially made you get interested in this topic? It's kind of obscure, right? Like, it's not the most obvious. What made you think, “Okay, this is what I want to study?”
Brody: Well, I'm from Southwest Florida. And that's an area that is geographically Southern, but not culturally Southern, really, most people there are transplants from the Northeast or the Midwest. And so I was a "you guys" user, my family were you guys users, all my friends used you guys. And so it wasn't until I came to North Carolina for undergrad that I started noticing that people that my friends from the northeast, Midwest, anywhere outside the South who had moved south, were starting to adopt the pronoun y'all.
And that was really interesting to me, because as someone who didn't consider themselves Southern, I just, that just would never have crossed my mind to adopt the pronoun. And what I started noticing, in particular, were those people were really involved in a lot of progressive spaces were people who are really socially conscious, who were very intentional about making their language inclusive and welcoming. And so those weren't characteristics I was stereotypically associating with your users, you know, before I moved south.
And so I was just really fascinated about this kind of new y'all user who, you know, was adopting the pronoun for reasons other than just because it was Southern, or just because they were growing up saying it. And so when I went to my master's program for the linguistics program, I just thought, you know, this would be a really kind of cool thing to study.
Anisa: I just want to note that you said you moved south from Florida, which is so telling.
Brody: I know, right? But it's weird. It's a weird dynamic in Florida, for sure.
Anisa: So you've studied the history of this term, right? So what is the history of y'all, when did it first show up?
Brody: You know, there's a lot of debate in linguistics about the origin of the pronoun, and how that contraction came together. What I kind of can say is that a lot of the research about the Southern accent just in general, is that a lot of what we stereotypically associate with sounding Southern really starts to develop around the Civil War. So it's actually relatively recently. And so we see things like saying pin and pen the same, for example, which we call the pin pen merger in linguistics, or, you know, "might could," which we call double modals. Y'all even as well, these things really start to become very kind of common in Southern usage around that time. Now, it was likely around before as well, but that's where we kind of see an uptick of its usage.
Anisa: I saw in your study that there's some like interesting usages of the term, which I know about, because I've seen them, but like, I hadn't really thought about them until you pointed them out, which isn't just, you know, what we think of as what people use it to mean, when they say y'all. How has that meaning changed? And like, why?
Brody: Yeah, y'all is just really linguistically versatile, right? So in English, there's this what we call like, the second person plural pronoun problem — it's a mouthful. English is missing a pronoun for the second person plural person. So almost all the dialects of American English fill this in some way. But beyond just being able to refer to a group of, kind of a plural group of people, y'all has all these other different functions, and some of these functions that are really unique and specific to y'all.
So one of the things that I found in my own research was that it's something that I call the associative y'all, and it's where y'all is used to refer to not only a group that does not include yourself, right? That's just kind of its typical function, but it's a group that you don't want to associate with. So something like that would be — and I am, I'm at NC State right now, so this might make the sentence a little bit more understandable. But if you said something like, y'all really think that Carolina blue is the best color when the Wolfpack is the best or something like that, right? So that form of y'all refers to a group of people that not only you don't include yourself in, but you think their idea is really unintelligent, or you don't want to associate with that idea. And so, in that sense, you're almost distancing yourself from that group of people. And this is a very common use of y'all.
There's another one called discourse marker y'all where you would say, "Y'all, I have the night shift again." Right away, you see that that y'all that precedes that sentence makes it so that it comes in front of a complaint, or some sort of thing that you have a negative attitude towards. This is also a very common usage of y'all. And these aren't very common for the other second person plural pronouns on the marketplace, if you will. And it makes y'all a really unique pronoun that gives people, you know, a lot of linguistic versatility to express different things that other other pronouns might not be able to.
Anisa: Do you have an idea of when it started moving outside the South? Because as someone who's lived inside and outside the South, I've also noticed this. It's been happening for a while, right? Can you give me an idea of that?
Brody: So interestingly, the first study that documented that y'all was spreading outside of the South, took place in the mid 1990s. And so this group of linguists did this survey where they found that y'all seemed to be spreading quite rapidly outside of the South. And this was really, really surprising — for me, and I think a lot of my friends, this seemed like a very recent phenomenon. But it's actually been going on for I mean, at least at this point, 20, 30 years.
And so this really shocked linguists when they first found this finding, because y'all is so stereotypically associated with sounding Southern, and sounding Southern is quite stigmatized in the United States. So why would this stereotypical Southern feature be spreading outside the South, instead of receding or disappearing as a lot of other features in Southern American speech seem to be doing in urban areas across the South? So yeah, at least — it likely was spreading before then, but that's where we first see documented spread, in the 90s with this study.
Anisa: And so why, given this context, is y'all spreading despite that stigma?
Brody: So, you know, this isn't the only answer. But this is one that I found in my own research, which was that y'all is increasingly understood as a gender-neutral kind of inclusive pronoun, in relation to you guys. So as a gender-neutral alternative to you guys, and this newfound utility of that pronoun, is allowing people to kind of adopt this pronoun where they might not have, just based on the fact that it was Southern, or they didn't grow up saying it.
And so you see a lot of what I call late y'all adopters who adopt the pronoun because they see it as this really useful, gender-neutral way to address a group of people. They might not identify as Southern, they might not have any other features that sound Southern or are associated with the Southern accent. But they kind of see y'all as this very useful tool for them to use in order to kind of be more inclusive or welcoming of kind of gender expansive identities.
Anisa: But the interesting thing is, this is a much more recent trend, right? But people — y'all has been spreading for quite a long time. So what are some other reasons that that might have already been happening?
Brody: The linguists who first documented the change in the 90s, really were saying that why it's spreading is because it's very useful, right? It fills in that second person gap. But we can kind of question that, right, because, you know, there is this gap, but there are a ton of other variants that people can choose from, right? So why y'all, especially y'all when it's so stigmatized. One of my thoughts on this, and this isn't something I've done research on, but y'all is also a feature of African American English. You know, the largest demographic shift of your users outside the South happens with the Great Migration, because as speakers of African American English are moving outside the South, we see a lot of y'all users moving outside the South, right? And so that could potentially be a reason for why it spread.
Anisa: After a break, we'll hear from a scholar of hip hop who also has some thoughts on this.
Antonia Randolph: I think the word y'all is one of those, like, supercharged words in hip hop. It seems really hip hop because rappers have immortalized it in catchphrases.
Anisa: Antonia Randolph is a cultural sociologist and professor at UNC Chapel Hill, who's written extensively about Black culture and hip hop. As a young Black woman growing up in Philadelphia, she says that the word y'all was part of her everyday conversations.
Antonia: My friends and I, my peers definitely used y'all among Black friends. But then I was trying to think, did my white classmates use y'all? And I did associate it with Black culture. But then by the time I got to high school, I don't think it seemed strange for my white classmates to say y'all, maybe and that probably had to do with the spread of pop culture.
Anisa: How do you think that the spread of the term y'all could be connected with specifically Black culture through hip hop, which has become like the dominant cultural form of expression, it feels like these days?
Antonia: Yeah, I mean, I think because hip hop culture is dominant culture, as you said, whatever is used in hip hop I think will be picked up beyond people who are even involved in hip hop. You don't have to be a hip hop fan to have y'all roll off your tongue, perhaps because you heard it in a rap song, a rap song that you didn't even turn to, it was on the radio at the grocery store. So because hip hop is ambient, you might have heard y'all and heard young people using it and just pick it up. So because y'all it's common in Black youth culture, certainly, and because hip hop often reflects Black youth culture, I think it's unavoidable to pick up y'all as one of the words that you might use in everyday life.
Anisa: And I mean, as a scholar of hip hop, you would know this much more than I do. My sense is that in the 90s, Southern hip hop became much more of a thing. Is there any connection between [that and] the more prevalent use of y'all in hip hop? Or was y'all always kind of a very common word that was used in hip hop?
Antonia: Yeah, that's, that's a good question. I was trying to think, how far back was y'all used in hip hop? And so I did a little digging. And in the song "Rapper's Delight," which is the song that popularized hip hop in dominant white culture, they say y'all a couple of times. And "Rapper's Delight" is made by some rappers who are associated with New York City. And so "Rapper's Delight" came out in 1979, and the Sugarhill Gang was a New York hip hop crew.
(SOUNDBITE OF "RAPPER'S DELIGHT" BY THE SUGARHILL GANG)
Antonia: So I don't think that Southern rappers popularized y'all. Because I think Black language already had y'all in it. I do think Southern rappers were self conscious in marking their Southernness. And so they would use language in hope that it would catch on that signaled that they're from the South, not from New York. But I don't think y'all is that word. Y'all I think was already within Black culture, not just Southern Black culture. So I don't think Southern Black culture was the vehicle to spreading y'all to the masses, just because it goes back to "Rapper's Delight," which is the first song that crossed over to mainstream audiences in 1979. And those folks were from New York.
Anisa: Right. And is that because, you know, during the Great Migration, especially, Black folks moved out to the, you know, all different places in the US, and so they took that term with them?
Antonia: It could be, if the origins of y'all has to do with Southernness and Black people wound up in the Northeast because of the Great Migration. That makes sense to me, that y'all just became common among wherever Black people landed. And so it doesn't have the same Southernness for Black people, I think, as it has for white people. So that makes sense to me.
Anisa: One of the things that I've sort of read about while I was researching for this episode is that it's been really a progression of y'all, you know, being more common outside the South, and now even globally. Yeah, like I have a British friend that uses y'all occasionally, I have — so I was actually born in Canada. And I went back, maybe like 10 years ago now to visit my family in Toronto. And my aunt used y'all and I was like, "What?"
Antonia: It's crossed the border.
Anisa: Yeah. And when I first moved here, I moved here when I was 11. That was one of the things I was like, I'm not going to use y'all, like I'm Canadian, and I eventually decided not to die on that hill, and I use it now. But it's just been so interesting to me to see how it's spreading. And I wonder if you have thoughts about what that means and why this particular term? It's like a plural you, which English doesn't really have an easy smooth plural you, right? Why do you think this particular version of it is getting so popular?
Antonia: I think for that reason, that it's really useful. We don't have widely circulating words that does that. Besides y'all, there's "youse guys" that they use in the Northeast. There's like the phrase "yinz," Y-I-N-Z, that folks in Pittsburgh use, but those have stayed regional. But y'all, I think because of pop culture, has been able to circulate. And it's really useful. I would think of y'all as something like "ain't." Ain't is really useful. If you want to be less formal, "Ain't no way I'm gonna do that." Ain't just sounds good to use. It does something that people want to be happening in conversation. And y'all's the same kind of thing.
And it's not loaded. It's loaded with Southernness and it's loaded with Blackness, and the Southernness might cut against it, but the Blackness — because Blackness is marked as cool — Blackness might help it circulate. Because Blackness without Black bodies attached is cool. So I think, yeah, it's a useful term.
Anisa: I wanted to bring up one of the things that the linguist we spoke to studied. And he said that one thing that he noticed was what he calls the dissociative y'all, which is used to sort of distance the speaker from a group of people that the speaker finds disagreeable. So for example, something like, "Y'all really think being late as a personality trait," or "Y'all need Jesus," that kind of thing, which I've, these are the examples that he gave me. But I've noticed that a lot, especially online, and I wonder how you see this, and if you think it's connected to the way that Black internet culture has sort of spread and also been appropriated by a lot of other groups.
Antonia: Hmm, that's interesting, a really specific use of y'all where it's not just you all, but it gets to have a meaning of distancing yourself from who you're trying to refer to, in a comic way it sounds like. I mean, I, I don't doubt it. I mean, there's so many inflections in how language is used that people using it for effect, there's so much about Black language that is a performance of cleverness, and humor, that I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't have something to do with people picking up on creativity and how Black people use language and kind of adapting it, noticing it, and using it to effect too.
Anisa: Do you mind if I ask you how you feel about that?
Antonia: Um, how I feel — I think people should become as aware as they can about the origins of language that they're using, to understand the language has history. And to know that language is embedded in power relations, so that all kinds of Black slang is adopted by non-Black people, and that's a form of appropriation. And it could be a form of domination, that could be a form of emptying out the meaning that language has among black communities, and treating it as though it doesn't have a history.
At the same time, because language and all culture crosses barriers, I think it'd be hard not for that not to happen. And so I think the best practice is probably to be aware of where language is coming from, to acknowledge that language has a history that is associated with particular racial and ethnic groups, cultural groups, like gay culture, that sort of thing. And to, to not imagine that it's innocent. But it'd be hard, I think it'd be unreasonable to think that people would abstain from using words that just become popular. That would be hard to do, because we just brush up against people. It's fun to do the new thing with language. And I think it'd be hard to back away from that as folks living everyday life.
Anisa: Thanks to Antonia Randolph and Brody McCurdy for offering up their expertise. This episode was produced by me, Anisa Khalifa. Our editor is Jared Walker. Al Wodarski provided audio engineering support. The Broadside is a production of North Carolina public radio W UNC. Find us on your favorite podcast app and on wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or tell a friend to tell a friend. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.