OK, 99.999% of Southerners only use “y’all” as a plural.
Evidently there are a few here and there that 1) don’t follow the standard usage, 2) have started using the plural as a formalizer like the Romance languages do (note that all of the examples given were between relative strangers), 3) have been misunderstood (see below) or 4) they’re transplants that got confused and just use it incorrectly.
Most times when I’ve had people tell me that someone used “y’all” as a singular, when they’ve gotten down to specific exact cases, the hearer misunderstood the usage. For instance, there are one or two specific turns of phrase in which “y’all” is always used, regardless of the number of people addressed. But it’s really a figure of speech rather than usage as a singular.
No. Disproving the claim that it is ONLY used for plural requires just a single counter-example.
As for thou/ you, I heard it was because of the invention of the printing press.
English had a letter thorn, pronounced th. So the word thou would be written as thorn-u. The presses imported from Germany had no letter thorn, so the printers used a Y instead. Thus, *thou *would be printed as you, but still originally pronounced as thou. And later the pronunciation changed to match the written form.
That’s what I heard. I can’t find any direct cites, but wiki shows that *the *was printed as Ye, so it seems plausible.
The chronology doesn’t really work out; þ vanished long before thou did. The only reason that the phantom ye for the survived was that þ[sup]e[/sup] remained as a popular abbreviation long after þ was out of general use.
I just went to YouTube and watched a handful of Paula Deen clips. Only one did she use the word y’all, and in all cases she was addressing the audience.
Aside - those clips were painful to watch. Her accent is painful to listen to. Then there was making donuts out of canned biscuits. Really? I thought you put sugar in donut dough, like a cake? Biscuits? Then there was the clip where her son (I presume) is going to tell us how to make meatloaf, and she’s in the background trying to watch TV and yelling at him to be quiet or she’ll miss her show. And they aired that shit? Oh, and deep fried bacon. And her dog’s name is, apparently, Odis.
Perhaps the spelling þe for “the” persisted longest in outdoor signage, since that presumably was painted by hand, and therefore less susceptible to the vagaries of printing fonts.
The “wrong” usage by Quakers (using thee for the nominative rather than thou) dates back to at least as far as the mid-19th century. I remember reading an article on this in an old Notes & Queries from the 1850s or 60s in which it was commented on. Before seeing that I used to think it was Hollywood getting it wrong (in films like Friendly Persuasion, etc)
The other “wrong” thing about Quaker usage is that the modern third-person-singular conjugation is used with verbs in the second-person-singular. The movie Philadelphia Story has an interesting scene that points out the difference. In a small town library, James Stewart’s character Mike responds to the Quaker librarian’s “What does thee wish?” with “Dost thou have a washroom”. Strictly speaking, Mike’s usage probably isn’t much more correct, because the use of “to do” as an auxiliary in the interrogative. Still, it points up how an educated person in those days would have used it. (In those days, just about everyone who made it through college read Chaucer at some point.)
I’ve also noticed that in the ST:TOS episode “Amok Time”, the Vulcan ruler T’Pau uses Quaker English (“Thee speaks?”).
FWIW, in central Virginia 50 years ago “y’all” could be either singular or plural. There seemed to be a slight pronunciation difference, too. Don’t recall hearing “all y’all” ever.
Normally I wouldn’t pedantically point out the lack of a verb in your latter clause, but in this case it’s impeding my ability to understand what you mean. Why is “Dost thou have” incorrect?
Powers &8^]
“Dost thou have…?” is not technically bad grammar, but it’s bad writing. Someone who lived at the time when thou was still current would generally have said “Hast thou…?” instead. It’s like saying, today, “I do have…” where “I have…” would do.
I live in South Carolina, right below Charlotte, NC. I have heard locals (not implants) use “y’all” to address both singular and plural “you”. I’ve been singularly addressed by someone from the south using “y’all” as far back as 1980, when a counter-worker at Dairy Queen in Johnson City, TN, addressed my singular self as I walked in the door with the term “y’all.” Thus, anyone who asserts that Southerners only use “y’all” as a plural is making a false statement.
So it would be wrong if you were trying to replicate 16th-century English speech, but for 20th-century speech incorporating “thou” and “thee” it’s just fine.
As a Yankee, I noticed very clearly the tendency for many Southerners to use “y’all” in the singular, and particularly when talking to someone they didn’t know (a “formal” usage). Anyone who hasn’t heard “all y’all” probably also hasn’t heard “might could”, and has no business talking about common usage in Southeastern US.
SInce you’re quoting numbers, please cite your source.
My experience differs dramatically from yours. I live in Durham, NC, and often hear the singular usage mentioned above, and most often in exactly that situation: a server or salesperson talking to a customer. Thus my inference that it’s used as a formal form. Maybe that’s not how it is where you live.
