Y'all

The Florence Y'all Water Tower in Florence, Kentucky; the words were painted in 1974.[1]

Y'all (pronounced /jɔːl/ yawl[2]) is a contraction of you and all, sometimes combined as you-all. Y'all is the main second-person plural pronoun in Southern American English, with which it is most frequently associated,[3] though it also appears in some other English varieties, including African-American English, South African Indian English and Sri Lankan English. It is usually used as a plural second-person pronoun, but whether it is exclusively plural is a perennial subject of discussion.

  1. ^ "Water towers loom large". The Cincinnati Enquirer. April 7, 2001. Archived from the original on April 24, 2022. Retrieved July 8, 2010.
  2. ^ you-all Archived March 27, 2019, at the Wayback Machine and y'all Archived July 10, 2019, at the Wayback Machine. Dictionary.com. Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary. 2019.
  3. ^ Bernstein, Cynthia: "Grammatical Features of Southern speech: Yall, Might could, and fixin to". English in the Southern United States, 2003, pp. 106 Cambridge University Press