It's interesting that the dialects are concerned over expressing the plural "you" but not standard English.
> Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 16:38:39 -0400
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Y'all and you guys
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> My Mom was from Western Pennsylvania. She would never think of
> referring to the plural you as "you all," or as "y'all." To her, if
> more than one of you were going somewhere, it would be, "Are y'uns
> goin' dawntawn?" If it was a really big group, it would be "y'unses"
>
>
> Warren
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Veit, Richard <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 1:57 pm
> Subject: Y'all and you guys
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> I had the reverse experience from the one
> Bill Spruill quoted:
>
>
>
> As
> a native Southerner, I was amused (but not very surprised) to notice
> that my
> students in Michigan
> have their own plural version as well – “you guys.” It’s
> used for both men and women (so the “guys” part doesn’t have
> its usual masculine connotation) and, as kind of a clencher for the
> argument
> that it’s acting as a unitary pronoun, the possessive in informal speech
> is “you guys’s” (the last word sounds exactly like “guises”).
>
>
>
> As a freshly transplanted Northerner in Wilmington, North
> Carolina, thirty years ago, I was invited by my chair
> to play tennis. Some confusion arose about which tennis balls on the
> court
> belonged to whom, and when the student on the adjacent court asked me,
> “Y’all
> got all y’all’s balls?” I knew I wasn’t in Iowa any more.
>
>
>
> Dick Veit
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
>
>
>
>
> Richard Veit
>
> Department of English
>
> University of North Carolina Wilmington
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
> interface at:
> http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
> interface at:
> http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________________________________________________
> Email and AIM finally together. You've gotta check out free AOL Mail! -
> http://mail.aol.com
>
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
> http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
Can you find the hidden words? Take a break and play Seekadoo! Play now!