The Nationalization of a Southernism

American Regional Lexical Survey: Gender and Age in Lexical Change in the Southern United States

“…For the future, research on variation in the North and possible trends there would need to be conducted. Studies shed light that some Southern variants like y'all (Maynor 2000, Tillery et al 2000 are starting to become prevalent in regions other than the South. It would be interesting to further investigate the diffusion of this and other Southern variants into the North and the West.…”

The Functional Nature of Pronominal Change: Innovative Plural Pronouns in English and Dutch

“…One argument for this is the fact that you guys has become a gender-neutral form for many North American speakers of English. It is well-known that the use of you guys is spreading rapidly over the United States (Maynor 1996;Tillery et al 2000).…”

“…compounds did (see, e.g. Maynor 1996 andTillery et al 2000 for recent data concerning the increasing use of 2pl. pronouns in the United States).…”

Representing American Speech

“…Second-person contexts, however, are much more likely to arise in conversation, and it is clear that speakers have been trying for a long time to fill the gap left by the merging of the singular and plural pronouns. Instead of replacing the lost singular forms, speakers seem to have accepted singular you and are deriving various plural forms from it, some using rules of English morphology (yous), some periphrastic (you-uns, you-all, you-guys), and one (y'all) that is perhaps a contraction, perhaps a single lexeme (Montgomery 1992;Lipski 1993;Tillery, Wikle, and Bailey forthcoming). An interesting question is whether a consensus will be reached among English speakers during the coming years, either worldwide or with national variation, on which form is the "standard" and, if so, which form or forms will win the plural slots in grammar books and dictionaries.…”