Contraction of you and all
The Florence Y'all Water Tower in Florence, Kentucky ; the words were painted in 1974.[ 1]
Y'all (pronounced 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.
^ "Water towers loom large" . The Cincinnati Enquirer . April 7, 2001. Archived from the original on April 24, 2022. Retrieved July 8, 2010 .
^ 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.
^ 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