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It’s casual but not overly personal, and heck, it’s just a lot of fun to say (try it: yawl, yawl ).

Other regionalisms have emerged to fill the gap, too, including yinz (hello, Pittsburgh), you-uns, yous, or youse, but is there really a choice here, y’all? Y’all is warm, and it’s inclusive.

What’s more, a map based on the Harvard Dialect Survey shows y’all and you all popping up in places you might not expect as far back as 2003 (when the survey was completed). But others hail it as the gender-neutral answer to you guys and argue for its inclusion in Standard English. Y’all ’s regional provenance prevents some from embracing it. Y’all is a contraction of you all, a construction that English speakers in the South have found useful for centuries. There is one option that strikes us as particularly useful: y’all. Spanish has the handy ustedes, but in English we are left with clunky approximations that often miss the mark tone-wise ( folks, friends, humans? ). We don’t have many options for second-person plural pronouns. So why has you guys become so widespread? It fills a gap in the English language. When was the last time you heard a mixed-gender group of people addressed as “girls” or “ladies”? Additionally, by invoking female and male in the first place, the expression you guys excludes people who identify as nonbinary. This argument comes into focus when you think about the absence of female-generic terms. Some argue that male-generic terms such as this reinforce androcentric bias and male privilege. True, the word guys has a gender-neutral sense in of “persons of either sex people.” But the most common and prominent meaning of the word is “a man or boy fellow.” Here’s why: What’s wrong with you guys?Īddressing a group of people as “guys” isn’t gender inclusive. The gendered baggage of this term has some calling for its retirement from the English lexicon. But as gender norms evolve, the usefulness and appropriateness of you guys comes into question. We don’t mean you specifically … but the term itself.įor years, the phrase you guys has been employed as a useful workaround when addressing a mixed-gender group. Hey, y’all, it’s time to talk about you guys.