That said, I believe that “y’all” is superior to “you guys” for sundry reasons. Y’all is a contracted, single word, a monosyllable; you guys is two words. Y’all is genderless; you guys is sexist. Y’all, in a southern drawl, is charming; you guys, in a Brooklyn twang, is ingratiating. Conversely, when a southerner says you guys, the diphthong is lost, and replaced with an ear-splitting nasality; but y’all, spoken by a Brooklyner, is natively nasal, and no more ingratiating than anything else he says.
Y’all is more pervasive than you guys. From what I can see, many Blacks, even in the north, use y’all. Oprah Winfrey is one example. Though she has been in Chicago for many years now, she still says five y’alls for every you guys. (For proof of this, Spiritus, watch her show.)
An ancillary debate is whether a specific pronoun for the second person plural is even necessary, but “you”, as the pronoun of choice, is about as commonplace as Esperanto.
And I’m sure you can think of, ahem, other angles to debate on this.
I disagree; “guys” and “dudes” is quite commonly used as gender-neutral these days, much as “they” is becoming a singular gender-neutral pronoun (“Someone left their coat here. I’ll bet they will be missing it.”–it even shows up in semi-formal writing nowadays). Soon we will not even question “guys” or “dudes” as referring to both sexes, I suspect. And “you guys” is far superior to “you guys and gals”, or, God forbid, “dudes and dudettes”.
Curiously, I use “y’all” almost exclusively when writing, but never in my speech. If you’re not born to the phrase I think it can sound horribly forced and awkward.
Fiac^o! C^irkau^ du miliono personoj parolas Esperante tra la mondo hodiau^! Klare, la plej multaj da ili nur scias ete eta da Esperanto – nur proksima cent mil parolas Esperante sufic^e bone, ke ili povas uzi gin c^i-tage.
“You” can be singular or plural. To my ear, “y’all” is clearly plural, a double plural in fact. In the South, however, y’all can refer to a single person, necessating (where clarity of a plural reference is required) the triple plural “all of y’all”.
By the way, in Pittsburgh, it’s more of a “y’ins”.
I went round and round with a Northerner on alt.usage.english about this a while ago. I’ve lived in the South for almost 39 years now, and I have never, not once, heard “y’all” spoken to refer to a single person by a native Southern speaker. Apparently, this is widely believed in the North, but it doesn’t happen.
It’s true that “all y’all” can be thought of as a plural y’all, but its usage is analogous to when someone would say “you guys” versus “all you guys”. If I’m speaking to a few people in a group, I would use “y’all” to mean those few people, but I would say “all y’all” to refer to the whole group.
About the sexist nature of “you guys”: to my ear, this phrase is specifying which sex someone is talking to. I know that it’s often used generically, but the first interpretation my brain gives it is about the male sex, and I have to go back and re-interpret the sentence when I realize that doesn’t fit. On the other hand, I naturally use the generic “he” to refer to a single person whose sex is undetermined. Some people have voiced objections to this, and I’ve asked why they are offended by that but not by the phrase “you guys”, and I’ve never heard a satisfactory answer.
You may tend to assume “you guys” implicitly refers to men since you are male. If you were female and had often been part of a group that was referred to as “you guys”, you would likely see it as gender-neutral.
Come to think of it, neither have I ever heard y’all used to address one person, except in a certain (God forgive me) Gay culture or (please don’t hit me) Black American culture familiaral slang.
Huh? Well, like, “Honey, y’all ain’t got no clue, just like Miss Thang over there.”
There is a reason yankees often think that “y’all” can be directed at a single person. It often is, but only when the person addressed is addressed as a represenative of some group. For example:
Me: Hey Mom!
Mom: Hi Manda!
Me: How are y’all doing?
Mom: Your father and I are doing pretty well. He has been a little sick, but nothing serious. Your litle sister is awful busy with school, and I think she chases to many boys. The dog died.
Me: And how have you been?
Mom: Oh, me, I’ve been a little mopey.
This ability to easily distinguish the individual and the represented group is one of the great benefits of a second person plural pronoun.
I’ve never heard “y’all” used to refer to a single person by someone to whom it was a natural phrase; only by Northerners who think it sounds cool and are using it (IMHO) improperly. I haven’t run across its usage in black or gay slang before (all the homosexuals I know right now use “girlfriend” and “bitch” to refer to their (gay male) friends–I wonder if those will ever become gender-neutral?)
Hey! I am, at least for most Northerners. If you’re not thoroughly accustomed to “y’all”, you sound like a dork. It’s like listening to a middle-aged man try to use street slang…ewww. I like different dialects and regional phrases, and don’t want either “y’all” or “you guys” to become considered “better”.
I say both. I’ve never even been to the South, but a good friend in high school was from Texas, and I picked it up from her. It’s a great word. I would never say it to one person, though, that would sound ridiculous.
You’re right! It’s often blurred together, of course, as “awyaw”.