Is there anything more wonderful to hear from a Southerners mouth than “y’all”? Many believe that it is a contraction of “you all”, but it looks like this is a common misconception.
Michael B. Montgomery’s suggestion that “y’all” descends from the Scots-Irish “ye aw” might have more of a standing in academic circles than the aforementioned one. He uses a Scot-Irish immigrant (living in New York) from 1737 as his basis. The immigrant said:“Now I beg of ye aw to come our [over] here.”
He also relies on two observations about “y’all” and its unique place among English contractions:
- They usually place stress the first word and contract the second, such as in the case of “they’re,” where “they” is stressed while “are” has been shortened. But “y’all” does not conform to this pattern. Instead, it stresses the second word, “all,” and contracts the first, “you.”
- There are no other contractions that involve “all” in English, whereas we have lots of contractions involving “will,” “not,” and “are.” These irregularities suggest a more complex origin, such as a cognate word, like “ye aw.”
John M. Lipski believes it entered Southern English through early African-American vernaculars or an African-English creole (similar to Gullah) in the first part of the 19th century. This academic line of thinking says that “children learn from the slaves some odd phrases.” Y’all is quite pervasive in modern African American dialects and lends support to this theory. So few records of its early usage could be explained to AAVE’s origin in a predominantly oral tradition.
Scholars believe that these two theories might go hand in hand. “Ye aw (perhaps)” made its way to American shores with the tens of thousands of Scots-Irish who emigrated from Ulster to Appalachia over the 18th century. This coincides with more than a hundred thousand African slaves surviving the Middle Passage and arriving in the South.
Notably, Irish immigration and the Southern slave population both grew significantly in the early 19th century and peaked in the 1840s and 1850s. (This is the period in which the Oxford English Dictionary has quotations for the usage of y’all”.
“Why, heern as how the regerlators wur guine to cotch y‘ all and swing y‘ up to dry, us thought we’d better heave to.”
— A. W. Arrington’s “Rangers & Regulators” Tanaha, 1856