Born and raised in the South, growing up it’s always been spelled y’all. Recently, I’ve been seeing more people spell it as ya’ll. Which I am struggling to understand because “ya’ll” doesn’t even make sense grammatically? The apostrophe should be immediately placed after the Y to signify that -ou has been dropped from the phrase “you all”. Placing the apostrophe after the a seems redundant because it’s splitting the word all instead of signifying that the -ou was dropped from you
orthography - "Y'all" or "ya'll"? - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange
Spelling “Y’all” as “Ya’ll”
Y'all'll or y'a'll??
What accounts for "ya'll"?
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Southern–American English nonstandard second-person plural pronoun
It should be the first: "Y'all"
In contractions, apostrophes represent where letters were taken out. "Y'all" is a contraction of "you all". the "ou " was taken out, so you put an apostrophe were it used to be, giving you "y'all".
Y'all is a contraction of "you all", so I would assume that y'all is the correct spelling.
Wikipedia gives some background on the topic.
It’s not a contraction of ya all, it’s a contraction of you all. The apostrophe replaces the ou, making it “y’all.” A small part of me dies every time someone types it like “ya’ll,” which means that tragically I have already lost years of my life and also an arm due to this. Like how did this even start, did someone pronounce it as “yuh all” instead of “yoll?” :P