In defense of "Y'all"

Raise your hand if in the last week you have unthinkingly used the phrase "Hey Guys!" to a group of people who do not necessarily all identify as "guys" and who may in fact be mostly women and/or transgender.

*raises hand*

I have in fact used this phrase more than once on this blog, but here's the thing: it's a widely used casual greeting that has generally been accepted as inoffensive, but in the interest of actual meaningful inclusivity, I'm going to start consciously weeding it out of my vocabulary.

It's not that I'm worried about offending my friends, and it's not that I think people are going to stop reading if I slip up here. It's not because I think the "special snowflakes will throw a fit" about it either. It's because honestly, it's a really easy thing to just stop saying something that is low-key exclusive and/or hurtful and use another phrase instead.

You know what word isn't gender-centric, racially charged, or offensive to any individual group of people, disenfranchised or otherwise? Y'all.

As my fellow grammar nerds know, loads of other languages (especially Romance languages, many of which are spoken in abundance in America) have a plural form of the second person "you" grammatically. In English, "you" is technically both singular and plural, but it makes it difficult (like a lot of other things about the language) to figure out whether one means to direct a statement at one person or at a group.

In comes "y'all".

I understand that if someone were to intentionally use an accent to make fun of people in the Southern states that this word does then become belittling. It could call up images of the ridiculous stereotype of a poor/uneducated "Southerner". I think though, that as long as you don't lay on a thick accent and say offensive things, "y'all" fixes the problem. I've heard arguments for "folks" (same problems there) or for just "hello" because well that's pretty darn simple, now isn't it? But to me that sounds cold and impersonal.

(Can we also please acknowledge the horrific effect of using "you guys" in the possessive: "you guys's"?! YUCK)

Riddle me this though - why in the world don't more people outside of the southern states use y'all? Grammatically it makes sense. People argue that it's slang, but the word "selfie" is in the damn dictionary now for crying out loud. Language evolves. It always has and it always will. I've even heard people hypothesize about adding emojis to the dictionary now because this is the way people actually communicate. It's all well and good to have hard and fast grammatical rules to follow when teaching someone a new language so that we really are all speaking in a way that can be understood. But I think we can budge in this respect to make things a little more clear, especially for non-native English speakers.

I don't imagine I'll succeed in converting many of you here, and that's not even really the point. The point is that A) I have strong feeling about grammar because I'm a total nerd but also B) we could probably all stand to look at the way we speak to others with a more critical eye. I'm not saying that anything you say could be offensive and that the victimhood of young America should be encouraged. Nor am I saying that if you keep saying "hey guys" to mixed groups that you're necessarily doing anything wrong. I'm just saying that languages evolve, people evolve, and sometimes the fix is as easy as saying "Hey y'all!".

P.S. If you enjoy thinking about the way language evolves, specifically revolving around inclusivity, you will probably also enjoy these articles about the usage of gender neutral and/or plural/nonbinary pronouns.