I wonder if there may be some slight permutation though, if “y’all” might ever be used in a similar sense to how I might walk up to an individual in a store and say jocularly (or condescendingly) “So are we finding everything we need today?” A non native speaker might later on protest on a message board that oh yes, “we” can also address the first person singular, someone once talked to me that way!
I don’t think the people that are saying the contrary are being malicious. I just think they don’t understand the true meaning of the term so they misinterpret what people really mean when they say Y’all. Language is a reflection of a thought process but also influences it as well. An equivalent term doesn’t exist in standard English so it doesn’t work well when people try to do a direct translation. That is nothing unusual. There are lots of terms that can’t be directly mapped from one language/dialect to another easily.
Standard English is a robust language but it doesn’t handle certain concepts very well. Using ‘You’ for both singular, plural, and multi-plural forms is a problem that lots of dialects have tried to address and that is why we end up with everything from Y’all to ‘Yous Guys’. Y’all is the most standardized and well-formed of the bunch when it comes to that concept but it isn’t an easy concept for some standard English speakers to conceptualize.
Where I lived in central Virginia y’all was both singular and plural, explaining the mouse/pocket quip.
I so agree with this. I’ve heard it used to refer to ONE PERSON (e.g., ME) thousands of times, as in “Y’ALL are crazy!”
Exactly.
One time I jokingly said to a visitor, in my best imitation Deep South drawl, “Y’all ain’t from ‘roun’ here are yuh?”. This wasn’t someone I knew, it was someone visiting a coworker.
How much you want to bet that she insists to this day that Okies use “y’all” as a singular, since I was only talking to her?
Any native, of course, would recognize that as a standard Southern joke phrase, and would never consider it as “y’all used as a singular”. It’s “y’all used in a standard/cliche phrase”.
Where you at?
I seem to remember from the last time we had this discussion, that there is some little backwards 
region that does this. They’re wrong, of course. 
The only times I can remember seeing this IRL is when some damn Yankee transplant starts trying to go native and doesn’t know what s/he’s doing.
Or, like I said, when some damn Yankee transplant misunderstands a native.
Present company excepted, naturally. 
Agreed. However, when contracting “you all will”, “y’all’ll” is just fine.
Greetings from six feet deep in the Heart o’Texas.
Howdy, neighbor!
Don’t forget “y’all’ve” and “y’all’d”.
That is the problem. You aren’t truly conceptualizing what someone means when they use that expression. They are applying it to not just you but a group that they perceive you are a part of. It could be your whole family or the group of people that you just came to party with even if it is just you standing there alone. It never means just you. They mean that many members of your group have demonstrated outlandish things. It is group concept and one that really hard for certain people to understand just because standard English doesn’t have good, succinct words to differentiate between individuals and groups.
I should add that the group being referred to is context dependent and people that grew up with dialects that use Y’all understand it intuitively but people that don’t seem have trouble with the concept. That is why I said that language not only reflects thought processes but influence them as well. People that don’t know those dialects usually want a one to one dictionary translation and there is none in this case.
Y’all can mean any group from the friends you are with, your family, or your sports teammates. People that understand the term instantly translate it into whatever group is being referred to without any effort and understand it even if they are the only one standing there talking to a person using the term. IT IS NEVER SINGULAR EVEN IF YOU THINK IT IS. Standard English speakers seem to have trouble doing that and it is interesting linguistic problem of its own.
I follow your argument, Shagnasty, but it seems sort of presumptuous of you to state that people using the word and understanding what is said to them are clearly mistaken. ftg’s example above of “Y’all are crazy!” is a case in point. I suppose you’re arging that anytime this is directed at me, it might mean, “women like you, Ellen, are crazy,” or “people who say things such as you, Ellen, are saying, are crazy,” but that seems rather protracted to me. “Y’all crazy!” may at its simplest mean, “crazy people like you are crazy” which also seems overly redundant.
Not my example. My experience are things like checkout clerks: “Y’all find everything you need?”, wait staff: “Y’all want anything else?”, etc. when it’s just me there. Claiming that the plural is correct here via some mental gymnastic means due to including those I’m with at other times but not right now is absurd and then some. Ditto claiming that those couldn’t be “Real Southerners” or that superficial characteristics like skin color makes a difference doesn’t help either.
It’s no different than people using “literally” for “figuratively”. Claiming that it doesn’t happen since it’s not proper is a medieval style of argument. Reality always wins.
I have no doubt that some people have screwed up the grammar on that term just like some people have for every other but there are real grammar rules for using Y’all as a native speaker and using it to mean one person in isolation is not one of them. I would be caught off-guard and ask for clarification if someone in the South used it that way towards me as an individual. It makes no sense whatsoever but the assumed plural form does. I never used it to mean an individual in isolation and don’t know anyone that does. It is very specific term with real grammar rules.
You can assert all you want that y’all is never singular, and yet I’ve heard it use that way plenty of times. It wasn’t a misunderstanding, and for those who feel that your sole experience must be the arbiter of everyone’s experience, realize that the world is not you.
If it helps, this article suggests that it might be an Oklahoma thing:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2009
Since I grew up in the northernmost parts of North Dallas, that might explain why it is more familiar to me.
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.
That actually is a pretty good article. It supports both sides of the story but mostly the one that says it isn’t singular except in isolated geographical pockets. I would maintain that Oklahoma isn’t the South and, judging from the article, it sounds like a minority of people there might use the singular Y’all for whatever reason but other people don’t.
The rest of article says exactly what the rest of us have been saying and that is a vastly bigger land area. I never read the article before I posted here but talks about some of the same things we did. The biggest one is using a distributive or collection Y’all when there is only one person present and still meaning for it to apply an assumed group. I still think the misperception about implied or distributive groups is the usage trait that most non-native speakers don’t understand and that leads them to believe someone is using it in the singular when a group in implied.
Which non-Southerner is telling Southerners how it’s used?
Sigh.
I forgot the </humor> tag.
No one but case dismissed on this one. Y’all is always plural except possibly in isolated pockets of Oklahoma. That includes all white people and black people of Southern upbringing (Oklahoma is southern mid-western or western but not the South so I can see how people could get confused in pockets because they are geographically removed from native usage).
All other cases are people simply not understanding that native Southerners have the concept of a distributive plural even though standard English does not at least in distinct words. Someone could confuse the meaning of the word ‘You’ meaning you as an individual or ‘You’ as a group and never know it but that isn’t the case with the word Y’all. It is a flaw in standard English that Southern speech tries to address in that form with real grammatical rules.
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. It is the same thing in this case except some people find it hard to believe that there are American English dialects with the sane types of rules that don’t lend themselves well to a one-to-one dictionary translation.