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Monday, October 17, 2016

Hey Y'all

Excerpts from Atlas Obscura -

Y’all, You’uns, Yinz, Youse: How Regional Dialects Are Fixing Standard English
The real enemy? "You guys."

By Dan Nosowitz OCTOBER 13, 2016

There is perhaps no greater argument that American English is a deeply flawed, infuriating, and difficult language than the simple phrase “you guys.”

“You guys” is the most common way Americans refer directly to a group of people; it is a de facto pronoun, duct-taped together.

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In “standard American English,” meaning, essentially, schoolroom English, the second person pronoun is “you,” for either singular or plural. Talking to your spouse? Use “you.” Talking to your spouse and his or her entire family, at the same time? Use...well, also use “you.” It is a huge, strange weakness in American English: when someone is talking to a group of people, we have no way of indicating whether the speaker is talking to only one person or the entire group.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/yall-youuns-yinz-youse-how-regional-dialects-are-fixing-standard-english

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