The place I go for coffee has a new coffee person. He has a weird accent, a bit like a Southern USA accent, but it doesn’t sound quite like the ones on TV. He says “haa” for “Hi”, “chaa” for “chai” and he asked me “How can I help y’all?” I thought y’all was only for more than one person, and I was by myself. But I vaguely remember some people on the SDMB saying “y’all” could be singular.
I live in Australia, and his accent is not like anything I have heard before. Any guesses where he might be from?
Yes, you can say “How y’all doin?” to a solitary person.
He probably is from the USA South, since the accents on TV are exaggerated. Morgan Freeman is one actor I can think of who usually gets it right. He’s from here tho.
Well, for what it’s worth, the ones on TV are often atrocious efforts by non-southerners who spent some time with a voice coach. I’m looking at you, Kyra Sedgwick.
Your description makes me think Georgia or rural Florida, but it’s really tough to make a call without actually hearing him speak. I’ve noticed the use of the singular y’all more often among Florida crackers than anywhere else in the south.
Really? As a Florida cracker, I have to say that we’d laugh at someone who used y’all to mean one person. Now, I might say, “How y’all been?” to a friend standing alone, but I literally mean “how have you and your family or circle of friends been?”
Yeah. My cite is Juanita, the waitress at the Waffle House in Ocala. Your explanation of the usage fits exactly – “How ya’ll been?” to a single customer. Now that you’ve laid that out, I think it’s possible that I misunderstood her for years, and that there’s an assumed plural there. Makes sense.
And watching American TV to get Southern accents is like watching Lost to get Australian ones. The only people I’ve heard do good ones were actually born or raised in the area.
The reduction of the diphthong in hi to a monophthong [a] or [ɑ] is characteristic of a lot of Southern American accents. In fact, it might be the one archetypal phoneme that Americans recognize as making an accent Southern.
A wild guess, but the residents of the Atlantic Ocean Outer Banks region of North Carolina have a distinctive accent known as “hoi toide”, based on the way they pronounce “high tide”.
Weedy, why not just ask? If he has an obviously foreign accent, he’s probably used to people being curious.
But it does sound like he’s a southerner. Southern accents on TV are often faked by actors who affect some kind of parody of a real southern accent, so I wouldn’t use that as a guide.
No. Both of these are always plural, though as mentioned in some cases they may be including additional people not present. Since the person described in the OP can’t have meant that–he can’t “help” Weedy’s not-present family or friends–I doubt he’s a Southerner.
No. “All y’all” has a specific and different meaning. It means that one is not only addressing or referring to multiple people, but that what one is saying applies to each and every individual within that group.
In my native, Mississippian, dialect, “all y’all” is used to refer to the people you’re speaking to, as well as others not present. Like if I was inviting someone to a party, these scenarios might play out:
If I only wished to invite Riff-Raff and Magenta and both were present when spoken to. “Come on over to the party, y’all!”
If I wished to invite Riff-Raff and Magenta (present) but also the other Transylvanians (not present), I might say, “All y’all are invited to my party.”
This may be an obvious point, but nobody has mentioned it so far: the South is a very big place. There’s no one “southern accent”. There are some commonalities, such as the pronunciation of “I”, but even that is by no means universal. Tennessee vs Texas vs Virginia are all quite different. So this person probably just doesn’t have a “TV accent”.
That’s fine and within the usage I described, I think. Consider–if you said this, and then only Riff-Raff and Magenta turned up, you’d be disappointed, right? “Where’s Frank and Nell? I said all y’all should come!”
