> when I hear a hipster who's lived here for 2 years try to inject jawn into every conversation. Feels very forced.
Same thing happens with "y'all", even though it's nowhere close to being as esoteric/regional. A couple years ago, Twitter seemed to have become obsessed with incorporating it conspicuously into every other tweet. I didn't even know "y'all" had rules until that happened. (I couldn't really tell you what those rules are, but it was popping up in places that were so syntactically awkward, by people who were clearly not "y'all" natives. So they definitely exist.)
I love ya'll because second person plural is something that English annoying lacks.
I'm also a fan of habitual be because it's something that can be expressed in English, but it sounds verbose or relies on context whereas "I be" is self explanatory without any context -you know that the speakers means "I regularly do/feel ___ "
My favorite phrase puts them together: "ya'll be trippin" is IMO the most efficient way in the English language to tell a group of people that their behavior is unacceptable.
On the one hand "yous" fills this void in a way that is more consistent with the rules of pluralizing words, but on the other hand it also introduces a homophone with "use" which could hypothetically lead to confusion. So which is worse, inconsistency (y'all) or ambiguity (yous)?
Ultimately, since "yous" never fits in the same grammatical slot as "use" (different part of speech), there's never any real chance at confusion anyway. Therefore I weigh in on the side of "yous".
Once again New York has it right and the rest of yous be trippin.
Sentences that end with a y’all still come across as distinctly Southern. Sentences that begin with y’all, on the other hand, sound normal or dare I say even hip. To me that is.
Same thing happens with "y'all", even though it's nowhere close to being as esoteric/regional. A couple years ago, Twitter seemed to have become obsessed with incorporating it conspicuously into every other tweet. I didn't even know "y'all" had rules until that happened. (I couldn't really tell you what those rules are, but it was popping up in places that were so syntactically awkward, by people who were clearly not "y'all" natives. So they definitely exist.)