Re: Californian vowels [was Re: Liking German]

>It'll be interesting to see if and when and where this
>spreads.  Another interesting dialectal fact I've noticed
>upon moving to Chicago:  a significant number of people
>here, most of whom aren't from the South, use <y'all>
>for the second person plural pronoun.  Jerry Sadock,
>the syntax professor here, informs me that <youse> is
>also fairly widespread, but <y'all> is spreading faster.
>That too does not surprise me;  there are between 75 and
>100 million Southerners who use it.
In Melbourne (at least) 'youse' isn't particularly plural. If I use it, I
mean everyone I'm talking to, be it one or many and there are other who'll
use it to mean 'you', both singular and plural. Do others' 'youse's and
'y'all's (or 'ya'll's) suffer from the same?

And of course, there's always the singularfication of 'we'... as far as I'm
concerned, the dative of 'I' is 'to us', a friend at work doesn't seem to
know of the I/me/my/mine group at all...

Tristan

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