| 词汇 | you-all |
| 词源 | you-all. The plural of “you” in American southern dialect. You-all (often pronounced y’all) is widely considered the ne plus ultra of southern dialect, but this expression, used throughout the South, is much misunderstood. Mainly ap- plied to two or more people, you-all can be used when the speaker is addressing one person, but only when the sentence implies plurality. Except for some speakers in the Ozarks and rural Texas, only a ham of a stage southerner would use you- all so undiscriminately as to say “That’s a pretty dress you-all are wearing.” But a southerner might well say “How you- all?”—the question intended to inquire of the health of you and your entire family or group. Further, the inflection of the phrase is all important. When the you in you-all is accented, as in “You-all must come,” this means that the group near the speaker is invited. The contraction of you-all, y’all, is always used in this plural sense. Recently the American southernism y’all (or yawl) has been explained, though hardly to the satis- faction of everyone, as a calque (a filling in of an African structure with English material) from the West African second person plural unu, which is also used in the American black Gullah dialect. This interesting theory is advanced in a study by Jay Edwards in Hancock’s and Decamp’s Pidgins and Creoles (1972): “In the white plantation English of Louisiana the form y’all (semantically unu) was probably learned by white chil- dren from black mammies and children in familiar domestic situations.” In any case, the closest thing that has been found in English to the collective second person plurals you-all and you-uns is the collective second person you-together that is sometimes heard in England’s East Anglia dialect today. |
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