you-all
/yoo͞′ôl′/
pronoun
- You. Used in addressing two or more people or referring to two or more people, one of whom is addressed.
What does all y’all mean?
How do you spell y’all?
Is it yall or y’all?
Videos
So I gave my friend a compliment on their post and was like “so pretty 😍” and they replied with all you! Now I really don’t know what this means and now I feel slow
Non American here so I'm kinda curious. How are they used differently in a sentence?
It's a somewhat informal expression that means "That sums you up/That is typical of you" and is used to express a moment when an individual displays typical behaviour.
It is formed: "That + to be + subject pronoun/name + all over".
Me: Snack?
Cookie Monster: Cookies?
Me: That's Cookie Monster all over!
I haven't heard that particular phrase, but it doesn't sound too un-natural to my ear either. However, I sense the phrase's meaning as something similar to the idiom, "that's you in a nutshell". (That is a small piece of the whole you which precisely reflects the whole you.) In OP's example, OP "never" does favors for the friend and refusing to fulfill this latest favor request is typical of the friend's experience when asking for favors from OP, and the friend sums up the way they feel, "that's [my experience of how] you [behave around me] in a nutshell"
"That's you all over" has the same (That is a small piece of the whole you which precisely reflects the whole you.) image around it in my mind, except I sort of see a distinction between wrapping and wrapped. "That's you in a nutshell" draws a picture in my mind of "you" as the content contained in the nutshell. "That's you all over" draws "you" as the container, the wrapping all over the content, containing it.
“You-all”—also occurring as “y’all”—is a second-person plural pronoun that occurs in some regional versions of US English. It is used by some speakers to eliminate the ambiguity caused by the Standard English “you”, since “you” does not differentiate between singular and plural.
“All of you” is a noun-phrase that may be used in Standard English when the ambiguity of “you” by itself would be confusing or misleading.
In most contexts “all of you” would be considered the correct phrasing. Some listeners or readers perceive “you-all” to be incorrect.
Both are technically correct, but the second ("you all") is less preferable because of the ambiguity of whether you mean y'all * or simply you all. Of course, if you're writing in a context where "y'all" is acceptable, then this isn't a problem.
You can slightly rephrase #2 to avoid the ambiguity, but keep more-or-less the same meaning:
You are all sitting here with me in my den.
Note that the "you all are"/"you are all" constructions mean something slightly different than the "all of you are" construction. The latter places emphasis on the fact that all of you are sitting here, as opposed to just some of you. The former put a very slight emphasis on sitting instead.
* As in, the slightly-redundant informal version of the 2nd person plural pronoun.