Is "y'all..." or "you all..." grammatically correct?
"Y'all's/Y'alls" - will we ever have an accepted word for the second person pronoun and its possessive in proper English? (Please don't answer with "thou" >\.)
“Ya’ll” is not the right way to spell the word and it needs to stop.
orthography - "Y'all" or "ya'll"? - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange
How do you spell y’all?
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What are the plural subject pronouns?
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Southern–American English nonstandard second-person plural pronoun
I'm having the best time here. I absolutely love a serious discussion on sticky grammar issues, especially the ones that make grammarians grimace.
So, given this, I'd love to know your opinions on the maligned (unaccepted?) second person plural pronoun, y'all, and it's possessive form, y'all's.
I can't help it, I just adore these words. And, I can't believe we don't have an acceptable word in English for this commonly needed pronoun.
What are your thoughts?
Edit: Sorry, I dropped the "s" on "thous", was pointed out in replies. Thank you, Rocketman0739.
Edit 2: For clarity, I'm not just considering the possessive form of the second person plural pronoun in modern English. That makes so little sense it shrieks of pedantry. Why would anyone want to have "y'alls" become part of proper English without also including "y'all"? For those who have made it clear that my example didn't deal with the possessive second person plural pronoun issue, please reread my post. It includes y'all.
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
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.