I have worked as a language specialist for most of my adult life, teaching Ancient Greek, English, Spanish, and Linguistics. Here’s my take on this iconic fragment of southern English.

For those of us living in or near the southeastern United States, yall functions as our second person plural pronoun. It is not equivalent to “you all.” Consider the following two questions.

• Are yall coming to the party?
• Are you all coming to the party?

The first is a question directed to a group people without necessarily implying that everyone in that group is committing to come to the party. The second asks if all of the addressed people are coming. It is equivalent to, “Are all of you coming, or only some of you?” This second question requests an explanation. Someone needs to specify who will be there and who will not.

Consider these examples as well:

• I’ll see you tomorrow.

Southerners say this when addressing only one person.

• I’ll see yall tomorrow.

Southerners say “I’ll see yall tomorrow” when addressing multiple people, but without necessarily implying that all of them will be present tomorrow.

• I’ll see you all tomorrow.

Southerners say “I’ll see you all tomorrow” to assert that we expect to see all those we are addressing now to be present again tomorrow.

Annoyingly, Google’s auto-correct as well as Microsoft’s do not take this distinction into consideration, and consistently change “yall” to “y’all”. (Anyone pedantic enough to argue that “y’all” is correct in all settings needs a bit more linguistic sensibility.) There is, fortunately, a way around this. If you want to communicate the usual second person plural pronoun rather than a contraction of “you all,” just click the little Ⓧ beside the auto-correct suggestion when Google Docs or Microsoft Word suggests changing “yall” to “y’all”. You’ll have to do it repeatedly for a while, but the program will eventually learn that you don’t mean “y’all”.

By the way… I asked Gemini (Google’s AI) to produce a map of the US where the southern dialect of English is spoken. It’s hilarious response is shown below. Notice the creative state and country names.

I tried requesting a map only of where one is most likely to hear “yall” or “y’all”. Gemini produced a somewhat more reliable map, but predictably listed only “y’all”, not “yall” in the heading.

At least this second time it left out the creative state and country names. It’s still somewhat inaccurate, of course. I lived in West Virginia for five years, and regularly heard yall there. And while I’ve visited New York and heard it there, it’s certainly not the norm for that area.

In texting and all informal writing, I have used the version without the apostrophe for some time now in recognition of the way the word actually functions in southern speech, where it is clearly not an equivalent for “you all”. I encourage you to do the same.

Why does this matter?

What is viewed as “correct” is merely what is commonly accepted as correct in a particular setting. What passes for correct as informal speech is not always acceptable in academic writing, for example, but even for academic writing, what is acceptable is nothing more than what is common in other academic writing. When educated writers adopted a convention as “normal” it quickly becomes a part of the canon of academic writing.

The issue of language change and the nature of what feels normal is particularly important now that artificial intelligence is playing a large role in what we read online. AI will for now, try to get you to write “y’all” when you mean “yall” because it cannot find “yall” frequently enough in the documents it is plagiarizing.

That’s right. What AI is currently doing involves an enormous amount of plagiarized material. It’s happening right under our noses and we can’t do much about it, but we don’t have to give up. We can influence what AI does by our own usage of the language. With time, as more and more of us drop the apostrophe from y’all when we don’t mean “you all”, AI will learn from us.

Feel free to join me in spelling it yall. You have the permission of an educated language specialist who knows a thing or two about AI.