Second person plural pronoun


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@Yaarel this spee h from Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar, with Marc Antony addressing the crowd with second personal plural pronouns (emphasia added), is instructive to "formal" usage:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
 

All y'all tends to be used for emphasis, such as when you're a tad upset and wish to emphasize your displeasure with everyone present: "Bleep ALL y'all!'
I am very much not a Southerner, being from Wisconsin, but I have used "all y'all" in spoken conversation, and it works at the right moment. I wouldn't use it in written form unless I was writing fiction. And since I have enough friends from the south, they feel like they can make fun of me for it, so it's sort of become a fun tradition when I'm with them.
 

I didnt realize that "you" originally was plural. The singular used to be "thou"/"thee", and the plural "ye"/"you". But to indicate formality and distance, the plural "you" came to be used as an honorific term of address. Eventually, "you" became universal for both singular and plural.
Thank thee. "You" is already plural.

Now the same thing is happening with "y'all", in the same way for the same reason. Many people in the South are using "y'all" for the singular when wanting to sound more polite. Heh, so the disambiguated term that sometimes happens for the plural is, "all y'all".
I . . . wouldn't look to the South for grammatical guidance. Ain't that right?
 

My take on singular y’all is that it’s a misunderstanding.

Consider a person asks a store associate do you sell X? The reply is no we do not. We is not singular here. It’s a reference to the associate and the store, a collective type of meaning. No one bats an eye at this.

Similarly y’all can refer to a collective even when addressing a single person, which is how a southerner would mean it, but someone not realizing this might assume it’s singular.
 

I've once meet a young woman who used Y'all in natural speech - it was notable as the only time Ive ever heard it used naturally and unironically - it was great. I think that for American usage Y'all should be popularized.

Those of us with proper British heritage have a harder row, but You all or you folk seems okay.

My native language already has plural pronouns, but in english I tend to say "all of you"
 




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