Why do people use the question "Where is it at?"

Factual Questions
1

I grew up in southern Ontario and moved to British Columbia about 30 years ago. While living in Ontario I never heard anyone ever use ask the question “Where is it at?” when inquiring where something is or went until I moved to BC.

In a slightly different context, some people here will say, “Where is that at?” when asking for directions or where an object might be located.

The proper question is, “Where is it?”, or “Where is that?” or perhaps a more precise question might be, “Where is that located?” I’ve never ended that question with the word “at”!

Where does this term come from, and why do people only on the west coast say this? It’s not only slightly annoying, it makes me wince every time I hear either of them and I feel like correcting the person who asked the question, but feel it’s not my place to do so.

2

What’s traditionally considered “proper” for formal written English doesn’t necessarily apply in colloquial spoken English. “Where is it at?” has been accepted colloquial usage in many variants of North American English for at least 150 years; you’re not going to change any minds at this point by telling people it’s not “proper”.

It’s not only people on the west coast (of North America) who say this. As the source quoted in the above link notes,

As the linked blog author points out, this usage remains extremely common in the first-person-plural form “where we’re at”, as in “where we’re at right now”.

I don’t think you’re going to be able to find a precise answer to the question of exactly where or when this construction originated, although Google Ngram Viewer attests to use of the phrase “where is he at” before 1820, and the related phrase “where it’s at” spiked in the 1960’s.

Your reluctance is justified, since (a) you’re right that you have no business correcting the informal English usage of other people, except maybe your own young children or a non-native speaker who’s asked you for a little grammar monitoring, and (b) this is a longstanding and very common informal usage that you don’t even have any justification for calling “incorrect” in colloquial speech.

Everybody has their own personal prescriptivist pet peeves about certain mutations in linguistic evolution (one of mine is the increasingly popular “based off of” for “based on”), but that doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to consider them “errors”. If you have official jurisdiction over somebody else’s formal written English, e.g., as a teacher or an editor, feel free to correct their use of “where is it at?” to “where is it?”. In all other circumstances, though, you’ll just have to keep your wincing to yourself.

3

Another thing I’m wondering about is whether it has two turntables and a microphone.

4

Hey, don’t take away one our most cherished localisms:smiley:

5

There’s the idiomatic slang phrase to know where it’s at, to be in the know, hip, savvy. If you deleted the “at” from the end, the phrase would become unusable.

6

We never miss an opportunity to use a preposition to end a sentence with.

7

In my area, the distinction is one of scale and mobility: something can’t be “at” somewhere unless they have agency and might be somewhere else. You can’t ask “Where’s the pen at” because the pen can’t be anywhere on purpose; it was just where it was left: ergo “Where’s the pen?” and “Where’s Alice at?”

“Where’s Alice at” means you were either expecting her presence or seeking her company elsewhere. “Where’s Alice” means you have a much stronger emotional reaction to her absence.

8

It certainly is a colloquialism but, and maybe it is just me, but I have always interpreted “Where is that?” and “Where is that at?” as having two different meanings, the last being more specific.

For example, if I was talking about the Palace of Westminster and someone asked me “Where is that?” I would answer “London.”

If someone asked, “Where is that at?” I would assume that they knew it was London but were asking for a more specific location with a possible followup regarding how to get there from the airport or a hotel in London where they were planning to stay.

ETA: Of course, I’m from north-central West Virginia where our language is probably 40% Appalachia, 40% Pittsburgh-ese, and 10% Southern U.S.

9

And (to OP) perhaps rather than just repressing your inappropriate reaction, try to gain some insight into why you’d have such a parochial reaction to someone who speaks a slightly different dialect to that of your own time and place.

How do you feel about English speakers from (say) Glasgow or Newcastle, who you might barely understand at all? How about Japanese people, who say things in a completely unfamiliar way?

I’m not claiming to have all the answers about the psychology involved, or to be critical of the OP in particular since “pet peeves” are so common, but it’s an interesting social phenomenon that people can get extremely worked up into a prescriptivist frenzy only about people who speak almost the same way they do, but not quite.

10

In grammar school, we were taught the rule of thumb to reply to a question such as, “Where is it at?”, by saying, “It’s right before the at.”

11

Are you under the impression that this somehow demonstrates the wrongness of the construction? A hypothetical smartass grammar school kid could equally well respond to “Where is it?” by saying “It’s after the is”.

12

Nor is it the only construction of this type. If you were in the South West of England you would hear people ask “Where’s it to?” Same arguments apply - it’s English, enjoy it.

BTW this wiki page suggests there is also a North American usage of this form:

j

13

Whilst this is occasionally heard around these parts, it is by no means common, and limited to older people in rural areas.
Anyway, the response to the question would probably be “yer tiz” (Here it is).

14

Hi Dave - we made many trips to mid Devon - Okehampton area - up to about a decade ago, and its use was pretty widespread at that time. (The people we knew down there who used it were not the youngest, I’ll grant you.)

It used to confuse the hell out of Trep junior, back in the day.

j

15

The OP is asking why people say this, implying (with indignation) that they don’t have a “good reason” for doing so. Others have noted that no one is under any obligation to satisfy the OP when using commonly accepted expressions in speech, but there is, in fact, a reason for this construction, which is related to Treppenwitz’s observation about a similar construction heard in Southwest England.

First, we should distinguish between the noun clause where we’re at, etc., discussed in the blog mentioned by Kimstu, which is an idiomatic expression, and the actual ***question ***which is bothering the OP so much. As **Johanna **notes, the noun clause where we’re at, etc., is a single, idiomatic lexical unit, and becomes meaningless if you remove the at.

The OP, however, is offended by the actual question, Where is it at?, and believes that it has some kind of faulty deep structure. Actually, it’s not really so different from questions such as:What is that for? (referring to a tool, etc.)
Who is that by? (referring to a song, etc.)and similar questions, which probably the OP him/herself uses.

In this case, the deep structure is like someone saying to you on the phone with a bad signal, “I’m at the market.” You don’t hear the last word, and you could ask for clarification, saying, “What are you at?” However, because location is the key issue, many speakers will substitute the interrogative pronoun what with where, as a kind of emphasis, and say, “Where are you at?” This is syntactically the same as the question, “Where is it at?”

So the issue here is not the use of the word at–which is similar to the examples above that I’d bet even the OP uses–but rather the simple substitution of the interrogative pronoun to emphasize location. Where becomes a token for the place–which functionally is perfectly reasonable and practical.

This aligns with the distinction UltraVires describes, and I would say that it is not just a regional colloquialism, but a broader and more or less standard usage.

16

“Excuse me, do you know where it is at?” :slight_smile:
“You should never end a sentence with a preposition!” :mad:
“Oh, sorry. Do you know where it is at, asshole?” :smiley:

17

And then there is the New Orleans greeting “where y’at,” which translates into basically a “how are you?” or “what’s going on?”

18

I would not expect to hear the preposition position rules anywhere outside of a formal paper. It just sounds so odd to the ear. I do agree the “at” is superfluous, but I couldn’t tell you whether or not I say that anymore or less than the other form. I know I would say “where is it?” but I could easily say “where’s it at?” too. I think the former would be used more for objects (e.g. a hairbrush), and the latter more for places (e.g. McDonald’s).

19

So basically what I’m getting here about the questions “Where’s it at?”, “Where is that at?” and various differences of the same question from olden-times through to today are acceptable. I am truly enlightened by all of your responses and I will not judge a person based on their location, dialect, or use of these terms and accept them as they are. Although my ears may be offended I should not be offended by the use of these questions.

Thank you to all who responded! Your time and effort have been very much appreciated! I have learned so much.

Now, where’s my cat at?

20

Do they also still use “What’s the haps?” out in B.C.?
That’d be Super old school.
I hope at least “rad”, “totally rad” and their ilk are dead.

Down here in the mid US, we “find things back” after losing them, rater than just “find them”.
Regionalisms are weird and, usually, inexplicable holdovers from some past dialect.