Is "y'all" a proper word (and is that the correct spelling)?
Editing style for consistency
The Short Story
Y’all is the crowning achievement of the American Southern dialect(s), a veritable linguistic gift from the South to the Anglosphere. It adds clarity to the second person plural. The alternatives are, to use professional editorial jargon, weak sauce. Y’all is the conventional and recommended spelling. Ya’ll makes little to no sense. Yall, which I’ll bet becomes an accepted spelling a few generations down the road, makes grammatical sense and is fine for informal, text- or chat-level writing. Y’all carries less negative baggage than in days of yore, but alas, it remains a colloquialism (for now) and therefore is best avoided in formal writing.
The Real(ist) Story
I nearly labeled this a grammar post. But as confident as I am in my opinions related to y’all, discretion and preference factor heavily when it comes to this very American, very Southern word.
Y’all, to state the obvious, is a contraction of you and all—pronounced as one syllable, [YALL] as opposed to [yuh-ALL]. The latter mispronunciation is a dead giveaway you’re a non-native speaker of the word.
I suppose it gives away my position on the topic question(s) that I use y’all fairly often in my writing here and on the Vaporous Realms site. Yet, in my perceptions and experience as a child of the twentieth century, hailing from a transient metropolitan region possessed of an overinflated collective ego, y’all has a history as a much denigrated, emphatically low-prestige word. (For folks residing firmly in the cultural and linguistic South, I assume this is less true.)
These days, most such prejudice seems rightly relegated to the historical trash heap. In short, if you mock someone for using y’all nowadays, you’re much less likely to garner scorn and much more likely to come off like a jerk than would’ve been the case a few decades ago.
I’d like to attribute this perceived shift in mass public perceptions to the fact that y’all is at the forefront of genuine linguistic innovation in the English language. I suspect, though, that Southern American English is akin to country music or Nashville: some combination of celebrities, reality TV, and social media has led the general American public to absorb select parts of it into the national identity, taking away some but not all of its original regional character. Long story short, y’all is a lot less remarkable and somewhat cooler now than it was when I was a kid.
Even when it wasn’t cool, I believed with an ideological fervor that it was a proper word. It’s been in common usage, including by educated Southerners, for a long while. Comparable to Welsh chi or German ihr, it performs a distinct grammatical function as the second-person plural pronoun—the word used to address a group of two or more. It’s a clearer, more precise alternative to you, which also (and often) serves as the second-person singular for addressing one person.
And really, what’s the alternative to y’all, except the less-precise you?
Youse is far more limited geographically than y’all and, to my eye and ear, has the misfortune of seeming like a grammatical error—akin to making mouse plural as mouses instead of mice.
Once upon a time, and occasionally today, folks embarrassed to say the real deal (or afraid it would sound odd in their native dialect) resorted to the uncontracted version you all. Whereas some people may think this sounds more respectable, I’d contend you all is just y’all in denial. And you all, like y’all, never broke into formal written English.
Much to my chagrin, change-resistant contexts like academia, law, and formal business settings continue to resist y’all. So I must advise y’all, reluctantly, to avoid it in such situations. (Give it a century or two. Y’all isn’t some passing fad.)
In the meantime, to be fair, we rarely write formally to a group of people in the second person. If there’s ever a whiff of ambiguity where you is concerned, you have the option of adding a phrase to clarify: I’m addressing you, [name the individual or identify the group].
When y’all is an option, I’ve seen a few different spellings proposed:
y’all — This is the standard, accepted spelling, with the apostrophe being a tip of the proverbial hat to you’s omitted -ou.
ya’ll — This may be a better reflection of its pronunciation in spoken English. But it’s either an error or a contraction of ya (as a nonstandard pronunciation of you) and all, making it a very informal spelling suitable, at best, for dialogue.
yall — This may be the orthographic destiny of y’all. Using it, as I’ve been known to do in informal written conversation, eliminates a punctuation mark that does nothing for readability (unlike won’t / wont or don’t / dont). Moreover, this spelling declares boldly that yall has morphed into a single morpheme, becoming more than the sum of its etymological parts.
Story Time
Formal but potentially ambiguous: You shall not kill.
Weak sauce (with an awkward rhyme): You all shall not kill.
Standard conversational (with a slick rhyme): Y’all shall not kill.
Silly-sounding for virtually the entire population of the English-speaking world: Youse shall not kill.
Godspeed and happy rewriting!
Y’all. All day.