True southerners are born knowing this. I came from California, so it took me awhile to catch on.
>...”y’all” is really singular ... “all y’all” is plural. Who knew? [RightField] True southerners are born knowing this. I came from California, so it took me awhile to catch on. [paulycy]
It makes me cringe to see that. :-) I’m a Southerner born and bred, and I’ve never used ‘y’all’ to address one person in my entire life (unless others were understood to be included, for instance, other members of the family). Also I’ve talked to many thousands of my fellow Southerners and never noticed a single one use ‘y’all’ for one person. I’d be shocked and wonder what was going on if I ever did.
Of course, being only one person, I can’t have knowledge of how every Southerner in every part of the South uses the expression. The majority view, though, is that ‘y’all’ is not used for one person. Wikipedia in this instance gives an adequate account of current opinion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%27all
[I also say ‘all y’all’, but that’s to emphasize that every person is included. Dialects without ‘y’all’ say ‘you ALL’ or ‘ALL of you’ to do that, but because we use ‘y’all’ as an ordinary plural ‘you’, we lose consciousness of the ‘all’ and need an extra ‘all’ for emphasis — ‘ALL y’all’.]