Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The One Big Happy from January 13th, with a widespread nonstandard pronoun:

Freestanding youse /yuz/ (= you /yu/ + pl /z/) and modifying youse in youse guys ‘you guys’. In any case, a 2pl form distinct from 2sg you. The form is complexly distributed according to geography, social class, and other factors — in a way that suggests it has been invented several times in different contexts.

And then there’s the pun on used /yuzd/.

DARE notes the pronoun in Irish and British dialects. In the US it locates the form especially in Northeast, North Midlands, and Great Lakes; the more recent citations from this area seem to be mostly from white working-class speakers (especially of Irish and Italian descent) in urban centers (Chicago, Buffalo, the Bronx).

The earlier citations are much more widely distributed. DARE‘s first cite, from 1862, is from a North Carolina soldier in the Civil War writing to his family. And there are cites from New Orleans, where the form is said to occasionally compete with y’all.

This entry was posted on February 15, 2018 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Dialects, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.