My kids have always been impressed with my ability to instantly switch back and forth from formal, educated speech to my natural hillbilly patois,* depending on who I’m speaking to. That includes using the second person plural “you” instead of the much more useful contraction “y’all.” However, “y’all” is the better word. There is a natural tendency among American English speakers to separate the plural “you” from the singular “you,” which has given us abominations like “you guys” and “you’ns.”
For much of the last couple of centuries, the use of “y’all” has tagged someone as being from the American South, which opened the door for denigration of the word because of who uses it. But it did not originate in the South; we brought it over from the old country, namely England. Nor is it isolated in the South. The rest of the US is fast adopting the word because it fills that need for a separate second person plural in a straightforward and inclusive way. Read about the origins and the modernization of “y’all” at the Conversation. Now if we can just get rid of that apostrophe, everyone would be able to spell it. -via Atlas Obscura
Listen beautiful relax classics on our Youtube channel.
*In this case, “impressed with” actually means “laughed about.”
Source: neatorama