Friday - A Word For All Occasions

[ninanevermore]

Today on my drive into work, I was thinking about the word y'all. I'm fond of it and use it un-apologetically. I'm a Texas girl and the word is my birthright. For the record, it is a contraction of the word you and the word all, and therefore the apostrophe goes after the y, not the a. It drives me crazy to see it misspelled.

People in the Southeastern United States in general, and Texas in particular, are simply not comfortable with the plural you. While it is grammatically correct, it is also confusing. If someone says, "You, please come here," and I am standing with another person, I have to discern if you mean me, the other person or both of us. On the other hand, if you say, "Hey, y'all come over here and look at this," my companion and I know that you want both of us to come over.

In the Northeastern United States, they say "You guys" or "Youse Guys" for the same purpose. But this implies a male gender, at least to the Southern mind, and is therefore discriminatory. We aren't comfortable with it. Guys are always males down here. Y'all is gender-neutral and all-inclusive. It also has a sound you can wrap your mouth around in a sweet seductive manner, and it flows from the mouth like music when someone says, "Y'all come back, y'hear?"

Actually, I don't speak with a strong Texas drawl. When I am on the phone with clients at my company, I don't speak with any regional accent. I go to great lengths to talk with a generic mid-American sound. Most of our clients are in California or the Northeast, and I don't want to sound too terribly exotic to them. Occasionally, people will ask where I am and they sound surprised when I tell them Houston.

"You don't sound like it," they say without fail.

I'm not certain what they expect me to sound like, but I have a good idea. The accent that Hollywood gives us in the movies is not ever accurate. They like to portray Texans with a deep southern drawl, like you might hear in Georgia or Tennessee. A Texas drawl is more subtle than this. A Texas drawl is a linguistic equivalent of a easy but purposeful amble compared to the slow stroll of the Deep South that stops to pick flowers as it moves along. A Texas accent also has more of a western edge to it. Texas is where West meets South in the United States, and our speach reflects this. If you need an example of what a Texan sounds like, the actor Matthew McConaughey has a nice Texas drawl when he speaks. So does Tommy Lee Jones. Still, as much as I love the accent and am not ashamed of it, I don't use it on the phone. It carries with it too many preconceptions that I don't have the time or energy to dispel.

I remember speaking to a client in New York state once. We were discussing his company, which he owned with a business partner. We had been on the phone about 10 minutes when I said something along the lines of, "There are several things y'all can do to fix this..."

The client interrupted me mid sentence. "Oh my God, what did you just say? Did I hear you say 'y'all?'" He sounded astonished. "Where am I talking to, anyway?"

"Houston," I said, "Texas."

"I'll be damned," he said, "I couldn't tell until you said that."

"I'm sorry," I said, "I didn't mean to startle you."

"No, no, it's all right," he said. "Houston, huh? Wow."

I slipped into an exaggerated drawl for his benefit. "I can talk like this, if you like." When I said this, the word like had two syllables. You must be born in Texas to try this trick at home; injury to the tongue and larynx can occur when people not familiar with the accent even attempt it. Also, you just wind up sounding ridiculous.

He laughed. "Don't worry about it, you don't have to."

"All right, then," I said, and steered the conversation back to the topic of business.

My favorite story about the word involves a girl I went to high school with, who originally hailed from New Jersey and who spoke with an almost stereotypical New Jersey accent, about as strong of one as I've ever heard. She had lived in Texas for too short of a time to lose her northeastern accent, but just long enough to pick up and start using y'all instead of youse guys. It came out, "ywwaaaaallllll" when she said it, which made me laugh every time I heard it.

She admitted that when she visited her cousins back in New Jersey over Christmas, they had laughed at it, too. She said she didn't care.

"It's a good word," she said, "I like it better than youse guys."

I couldn't agree more.

Comments

[squidflakes.livejournal.com]

I used to be in radio, so I trained myself to have a neutral American accent. I have the bad habit of picking up accents and phrases from the people I speak with and using them in the conversation, so when I get around Northeasterners its all "Ayup, I wanted to go down the shore-a for a pop, but ya can't get there from hear-a"

I get anywhere in the deep south, and I drawl like my jaw has forgotten how to move, and my tongue is too exausted from the heat.

The worst is if I'm around non-American english speakers.

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

Heh. That only happens to me with Southern accents. I don't pick up other ones (but I can usually make fun of them very well). I once had a friend from Kentucky ask me if I was making fun of her, because after spending all day in her company I was talking just like her. Until she pointed it out, I hadn't even noticed.

[erinmack.livejournal.com]

I'm from Philadelphia, where "youze guys" is pretty much king. I've adapted it slightly to "youze", which I like. I use "y'all" a lot despite my roots, but I always feel like a poser when I do. I'm a big fan of the Pittsburgh term "yinz", which is also gender-neutral.

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

Yinz is new to me. I guess I haven't talked to enough people from Pittsburgh.

I actually like regional accents and colloquialisms. Language is like a living thing grows and takes on new forms where ever you plant it; I think that's wonderful.

[welfy.livejournal.com]

I'm from the Pittsburgh area. :^)

[highlandwolf.livejournal.com]

Nice way to describe the Texas accent. There are many forms and variations that will trip up the outsider too. Some places we roll the "r" and some places not-so-much. You can readily tell the difference between someone from west Texas, and someone from Houston or Dallas.

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

As my Cajun buddy like to say, "True, dat."

East Texas has a distinct twang, which is absent in W. Texas speech. S. Texans sound almost like Californians, due to the heavy influence of Spanish in that part of the state. Houston and Dallas each have a very unique sound all of their own.

But none of us sound anything like "Texans" do in the movies. :P

[welfy.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinz

I'm an hour northwest of Pittsburgh and yes, we do talk like that. It bleeds over into eastern Ohio, too. I think southern accents are darling. One time, I even ran off with a guy from Mississippi because I loved how he talked. Too bad he was engaged and didn't tell me until later on. :^P

The Soop is from Kentucky and I'm disappointed to say he doesn't have much of an accent at all. He was in radio during college and had really trained himself to not sound so "rural." He slips into it a bit whenever we're around other Kentucky people. Maybe it's good he talks like he does, because I can barely understand a word they're saying. And he says *I* talk strangely.

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

That's a funny thing about Soop not wanting to sound "rural," since city Southerners have accents, too. It boils down to the ugly stereotypes that I want to avoid when I talk to people on the phone. Californians don't try to not talk like Californians (they, too, have a very distinct sound, esp. Southern Californians), and New Yorkers don't try to not sound like New Yorkers, but plenty of Southerners abandon their accents like they were something to feel ashamed of.

Let's start broadening horizons - you stick with yinz and I'll stick with y'all and we'll just make people accept us and love us for who we are. ;D

[ladyhyacinth.livejournal.com]

Ironic as it may sound especially in a place like NZ, I tend to hear y'all on occassion as well, and it damn well irritates me for the mere reason that it has no history at all with us. Its just a word that some use.

Its better than youse though lol..

A word that is used alot is bro here or sweet azz

Ie "yo bro, get your arse over here"
"shes' sweet azz"

Hes my bro.. or cuzzy bro..

lol..

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

Y'all in NZ? Too funny. Dialects have a way of cross pollinating. If hip-hop is popular over there, that's one place it could have come from. A lot of Black Americans, even those who aren't from the Southeast, have Southern roots and this word shows up in their speech and hence their music, which is a popular international export.

But language is going to grow and cross pollinate; it's a living thing, much like a spreading vine that moves out the neat bed we try to plant it in and moves across the lawn. I have abandoned any ideas I once held about language "purity." Old words will be discarded and new ones will be born (when's the last time you heard anyone say anon?); old words will be used in new ways (in the U.S., "respect" went from being a noun to a verb in the last 20 years and it really bothered me until I got used to it); a new region will adopt a phrase borrowed from a different one.

Apparently, y'all floated over on some cultural wind and has taken root with certain people in NZ. It could have been worse; you could have wound up with youse guys...

True dat!

[coupesetique.livejournal.com]

Going from Cajunland to the Pacific NW wasn't too much of a shocker. I have somewhat of a Cajun accent, but 6 years of Seattle livin' has diminished it greatly.

I find people here very biased to Southerners. I had to replace my "y'all" with "you guys" because I'd actually get very teasing and negative comments. One guy asked me if I was inbred because he'd heard all Southerners were inbred. Mind you, this was an older gentleman, too..

The other thing about Southern speech is the rate of words spoken per minute. Since I learned my speech patterns in Louisiana, I still tend to speak really fast and sometimes slur my words together. In other parts of the south, they don't speak as fast.

Oh, and I have trouble with "oi" words, like "oil", "boil", and so on. "oil" is pronounced like "awl", "boil" becomes "bawl". It's the one part of Southern speech I can't get rid of.

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

What's with that bias? When we are actually so damn cute?

My husband is from Washington state (grew up in Spokane). If I spend a day with my East Texas relatives and come home talking with their twang, it drives him up the wall.

Cajun speech takes come getting used to; I confess to having to stop and thing about what I've heard when I hear a Cajun talk sometimes. But it's grown on me and I've learned to love the poetry and music of it's rhthems. My Cajun friend actually went to a speech therapist when she first came to Houston. She couldn't pronounce the "th" sound to save her life, or so she told me. She would say things like, "Who dat?" "What dis?" and so on. But a South Louisiana accent isn't like any other Southern accent. The French influence is very pronounced and it effects the order that they put their words in when they talk (it sounds backwards to me). Myself, I could listen to then talk all day, like the big Texas couyon that I am.