What does “y’all” mean and where do people say it?
Easy Taco Boats For Family Dinner
A2 English listening practice · Southern American English · Picked for people who know a little
Y’all is the Southern American English contraction of you all. It works as a second-person plural pronoun, the way vosotros does in Spain or ihr in German. Standard English lost its plural you centuries ago, leaving Americans to invent regional fixes: y’all in the South, you guys in the North, youse in parts of the Northeast, you’uns in Appalachia. Y’all came out of the antebellum South and was shaped in part by African American Vernacular English. It has spread well past the South recently, partly because it sounds friendlier than you guys.
In this clip, a Southern home cook opens with “Hey, y’all” and signs off with “Let’s eat, y’all.”
How common are the words?
How common are the words in this A2 English listening practice video?
How common in written English
How common in spoken English
Harder words in this video
These words are harder than A2. Here is what they mean.
Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · SUBTLEX-US 2012 (spoken). These numbers are close, not perfect.
- ▸In Southern American cooking shows (Trisha’s Southern Kitchen, The Pioneer Woman, Cook’s Country)
- ▸In country music (Kacey Musgraves, Dolly Parton, Morgan Wallen)
- ▸In Southern-set TV (The Righteous Gemstones, Sweet Magnolias, Hart of Dixie)
- ▸In Texas, Georgia, and Tennessee everyday speech, across age and class
- ▸In Twitter and TikTok captions far outside the South, used as a friendly hello