Final y’all and youse thoughts
Published by Becky S March 9th, 2004 in style & grammarIt’s not really surprising that y’all trounces youse in a Google smackdown. But here’s a shocker–y’all is more common than youse in the state of New Jersey. Bert Vaux and others at Harvard University compiled a dialect survey back in 2002, and one of the questions was “What word(s) would you use to address a group of two or more people?”. Nationally, it breaks down like this (10,764 respondents):
- you all (12.63%)
- yous, youse (0.67%)
- you lot (0.18%)
- you guys (42.53%)
- you ‘uns (0.20%)
- yins (0.37%)
- you (24.82%)
- other (4.62%)
- y’all (13.99%)
Harvard’s results page also maps the responses, and of course the youse group is mostly concentrated in the New Jersey/Eastern Pennsylvania region. The data is also presented by state, and this information surprised me. For New Jersey (692 respondents):
- y’all (5.35%)
- yous, youse (2.61%)
. I guess youse is more of a Pennsylvania thing, but even there, it’s pretty close (1,013 respondents):
- y’all (4.08%)
- yous, youse (4.68%)
But seriously, the surveys for this study were completed online, which doesn’t seem like a good way to get a representative sample.
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I think of youse as an exclusively Pennsylvania thing, and specifically a Philly thing - does the Harvard survey say how much it’s used in other states? I see PA at 4.68% and NJ at 2.61%, and I’d guess Delaware would be up there - but if you subtract those, and allow a margin of error for people who selected “yous” by accident, then the national average is probably closer to 0% than 0.67%.
The answers you seek are in the links, my young apprentice. Delaware is an good point–I always forget about Delaware. Here are the results:yous, youse (0.0%)y’all (20.93%)Very interesting…New Jersey gets some trickle down youse from Philly, but Delaware doesn’t seem to. I guess you’re right about it being more of a PA/Philly thing than a Jersey thing. I’ve always associated youse with New Jersey, probably because it makes me think of gangsters.
Check it out - Pittsburgh has one practically to itself: “yins.” Only 300 miles away and yet I’ve never heard of “yins.” Maybe it’s one of those things like “Missourah” that nobody actually says anymore.
Still, it’s pretty cool that Pennsylvania has two variations more or less all to itself. (Yes, “youse” is basically just a Philly-region thing.)
Of course you do not see youse in Delaware and I am sure that the southern most part of NJ does not use youse either. Afterall, if you look at the map, they are both below the Mason Dixon line and y’all know what that means.