Y’all, Ya’ll, Yawl: Which is Correct?
Every Monday, our Putrid Prose column features grammar, punctuation, and usage bloopers we find in other people’s writing. In the interest of fairness, I’m confessing to one of my own bloopers. On Twitter, I wrote:
About 50 new followers joined us today. Where are ya’ll coming from?
One of our followers–cyndilou-immediately replied:
ACK! Y’all is short for you all. Apostrophe needs to go between the ‘y’ and ‘a’.
Sorry, it’s a pet peeve
Serves me right for trying to sound folksy and Southern!
Just to be certain of my error, I checked the bastion of all knowledge, Wikipedia. It says:
Y’all, sometimes spelled as Ya’ll, Yawl, or Yaw, and archaically spelled You-all, is a fused grammaticalization of the phrase you all. It is used primarily as a plural second-person pronoun, and less often as a singular second-person pronoun… There appears to be an increasing tendency, especially on the Internet, to spell it without the apostrophe, yall.
Okay. That’s more than I ever wanted to know. And what the heck is grammaticalization?
I did notice that my spelling, ya’ll, appears on the “sometimes” list. That must be the way Seattleites spell y’all.
