The real enemy? “You guys.”
Source: Y’all, You’uns, Yinz, Youse: How Regional Dialects Are Fixing Standard English | Atlas Obscura
My husband, always one to find fault with the English language, found this article and passed it along to me. His first language is Spanish, and while he speaks English with near native fluency, he always is saying, “English is WEIRD” because of the crazy nuances and strange rules. This article backs up his argument. I imagine for a non-native speaker of any kind of English, let alone American English, it can get rather confusing. I know Southern American English (meaning from the Southern US) can get confusing for my husband, but he does understand “y’all” since I picked that up during my years in the South. But accusations of being one that would say, “youse” as a native New Jerseyan would be untrue, as I’ve never said that. Regional dialects are crazy!
Read this article, and tell me what you think of this. Is this something that we should work to correct, or leave it be? Put y’all’s comments below. 😉
–TechCommGeekMom
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Danielle M. Villegas is a technical communicator who currently employed at Cox Automotive, Inc., and freelances as her own technical communications consultancy, Dair Communications. She has worked at the International Refugee Committee, MetLife, Novo Nordisk, BASF North America, Merck, and Deloitte, with a background in content strategy, web content management, social media, project management, e-learning, and client services. Danielle is best known in the technical communications world for her blog, TechCommGeekMom.com, which has continued to flourish since it was launched during her graduate studies at NJIT in 2012. She has presented webinars and seminars for Adobe, the Society for Technical Communication (STC), the IEEE ProComm, TCUK (ISTC) and at Drexel University’s eLearning Conference. She has written articles for the STC Intercom, STC Notebook, the Content Rules blog, and The Content Wrangler as well. She is very active in the STC, as a former chapter president for the STC-Philadelphia Metro Chapter, and is currently serving on three STC Board committees. You can learn more about Danielle on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/daniellemvillegas, on Twitter @techcommgeekmom, or through her blog.
All content is the owner's opinions, and does not reflect those of her employers past or present.
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I liked the article, although I think the writer was a little too hard on “you guys.” As a native New Jerseyan, like you, I never said “youse”; it was always “you guys.” As a Southerner by choice, I think that “y’all” is sublime. (BTW, sometimes we say “all y’all” when talking to a big group. I wonder what your husband would make of that.)