# Hey y'all: is there any difference in how southerners/Texans vs. black people use "y'all"? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 31, 2013, 8:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hey-yall-is-there-any-difference-in-how-southerners-texans-vs-black-people-use-yall/648899 "2013-01-31T08:49:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2013, 3:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hey-yall-is-there-any-difference-in-how-southerners-texans-vs-black-people-use-yall/648899/41 "2013-02-05T03:07:51Z")
> [@Shagnasty](#): > > I should add that there is nothing special about this. When I tried to learn Spanish, one of the hardest things about it were to try to understand the various ‘You’ forms. Some were informal and some were formal plus some were distributive. The textbooks try to spell out the rules but it really is really difficult to learn it that way and I never found it intuitive as a non-native speaker but three year old native speakers found it effortless even though it is hard to articulate the precise rules. [hijack]In eighth grade, we were learning those rules. In Spanish, the formal second person often appears identical to the third person: “your” and “his” are both “su,” whereas the informal “your” is “tu.” Our textbook had a mildly humorous passage to illustrate the difficulty. One character tells a stranger on the beach that “su” towel just got blown away by the wind, and the second character is all, why would I care about what happens to his towel? The first character asks if he can be informal (puedo tutearlo consigo or something like that); the second agrees; he then explains that “tu” towel got blown away, and the second character goes chasing after the towel after Ayayaying it up. Our genius of a Spanish teacher had us read the passage out loud, round robin, **in English**. There’s absolutely no way to make the story coherent in English. [/hijack] ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2013, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hey-yall-is-there-any-difference-in-how-southerners-texans-vs-black-people-use-yall/648899/42 "2013-02-05T18:17:21Z")
> [@Labrador\_Deceiver](#): > > It always cracks me up in these threads when a bunch of non-native southerners all show up and tell us how y’all is really used. > > It’s plural. Always has been, and if you use it in the singular we’ll look at you like you’ve grown a second head. Again, I have no idea where this absurd style of thinking comes from. Just because it’s “wrong” to use “y’all” in the singular doesn’t mean it never happens. It happens a _lot_. And not just in Oklahoma and it has _nothing whatsoever_ to do with non-Southerners. A lot of use hear this on a regular basis. This is called “reality”. Deal with it. And remember, it’s not just used as a 2nd person pronoun, it’s becoming progressively used as a generic filler word. Some people like saying it, so they say it in situations where it’s not needed or makes no sense. That’s language for you. Theory vs. practice. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hey-yall-is-there-any-difference-in-how-southerners-texans-vs-black-people-use-yall/648899.md?page=2)