Easy Taco Boats For Family Dinner

What does “y’all” mean and where do people say it?

Y’all is the Southern American English contraction of you all. It works as a second-person plural pronoun, the way vosotros does in Spain or ihr in German. Standard English lost its plural you centuries ago, leaving Americans to invent regional fixes: y’all in the South, you guys in the North, youse in parts of the Northeast, you’uns in Appalachia. Y’all came out of the antebellum South and was shaped in part by African American Vernacular English. It has spread well past the South recently, partly because it sounds friendlier than you guys.

In this clip, a Southern home cook opens with “Hey, y’all” and signs off with “Let’s eat, y’all.”