Vocabulary
Y'all, You Guys or Youse? English's Missing Plural You
Standard English lost its plural “you” centuries ago, and every region has invented a replacement. Y'all across the American South, you guys across the North and West, youse in Liverpool, Ireland, Tyneside and Australia, you lot in England, and ye in Ireland.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
How do you usually address a group of people informally?
Complete: “Are ___ coming with us?”
- You guys
- Y’all
- You lot
- Yous / youse
- You all
- Ye
- Just “you”
Who says what
Each accent profile in the survey has an expected answer to this question. Where a profile allows more than one answer, the region genuinely varies.
You guys
Expected in 7 of the survey's accent profiles.
You lot
Expected in 10 of the survey's accent profiles.
Yous / youse
Expected in 8 of the survey's accent profiles.
Why this question is in the survey
Vocabulary questions like this one are the fastest way to place a speaker, because the answer is a single conscious word choice rather than a sound people cannot hear in themselves. They also travel: a word that splits England into five regions often splits North America into three quite different ones. Every answer is stored with a coarse map cell for the town you grew up in, and a region is coloured in once at least five people there have answered.
See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.