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Fish don’t know they’re wet, and we English speakers don’t know we’re weird. Have you ever thought about how odd it is that English uses the same word for “you” in the singular and the plural?
Possibly not, because to speak English lifelong is to sense this as normal. But try to think of another language where there is only one word for “you.” Imagine if in Spanish one used “usted” to mean both one person and several, or if in French there were no “tu” and “vous” was the only word ever used to mean “you.” As often as not, languages do even more than just distinguish the singular and plural in the second person, marking distinctions of politeness as well. In Hindi there is the informal singular “tū,” the more formal “tum” and then “āp” for addressing elders and others to whom one is meant to show respect.
And in cases where English serves as the foundation for brand-new languages, one of the first things people do is fill in the “you” hole. When the British first arrived in Australia, one of the ways they initially communicated with Indigenous people was through a pidgin English with a limited vocabulary. That pidgin was later used throughout the South Seas area, and ultimately flowered into actual languages. One of them is now the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea. In that language, Tok Pisin, no one puts up with this business of using “you” for all numbers of people. Rather, they get even more fine-grained than most others: They address two people as “yutupela” — you two fellows — and three as “yutripela.”
In creoles such as Jamaican patois and Gullah, which stem from a creole English created by slaves from Africa on plantations in the United States, right away a plural “you” pronoun, “unu,” was borrowed from the Nigerian language Igbo. In Gullah this comes out as “hunnuh.” For example, in the 1990s, Lawry’s Seasoned Salt ran an ad in Essence magazine, presumably in response to the film “Daughters of the Dust,” which featured Gullah dialect, with the Gullah translation for “We think great-great-great-grandma would’ve loved Lawry’s” as “Oona gal tink we’s nana beena lub de Lawry’s Seasnin’.” Why Igbo was used for creating a plural “you” is impossible to know. But the mystery itself seems almost to suggest a kind of urgency, as if the creators wanted to fix a problem so eagerly that they went with the first thing someone happened to seize on.
And of course, way back when, English itself had “thou” for the singular and “you” for the plural — or actually “ye,” as in “Hear ye” — the form “you” was used as an object, as “thee” was in the singular. This was all like a normal language. But after a while standard English booted “thou” entirely, despite how noble and quaint it sounds in the Bible. Today it holds on in many rural dialects in Britain, often as “tha” — recall the gamekeeper in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” saying to the protagonist, “Tha mun come ter th’ cottage one time.” But seemingly everywhere else in Europe today, even in standard language, one toggles between “tu” and “voi” (or “lei”) (Italian) or “ty” and “vy” (Russian) or “du” and “ihr” (or “Sie”) (German). What happened with English?
It’s something we may never have a complete answer to. Certainly, in the Middle Ages across Europe, a fashion arose in various languages of addressing individuals with the plural pronoun as a mark of respect. The idea was that using a singular form was too direct; the plural form suggested a kind of polite distance, rather like Queen Victoria’s reputed fondness for saying about herself that “we are not amused,” the premise being that to refer to herself in the singular would suggest that she was on the same level as ordinary people.
At first, this usage of “you” was between people of higher status, with the expectation then developing that people lower on the social scale would address their betters as “you” while addressing one another as “thou.” But the “you” fashion spread down the scale, with even middle-class couples alternating between calling each other “thou” and “you” depending on factors of formality, affection and subject matter. In Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” Benedick, likely wanting to connote intimacy to Beatrice, tells her, “Come, bid me do anything for thee.” But a bit later, when he is addressing a more formal and even menacing matter, he switches to “you”: “Think you in your soul the Count Claudio hath wronged Hero?”
This stage was paralleled in many European countries, but the odd thing about English is that “you” then edged out “thou” completely in the 17th century. Why English took it this far is difficult to know. At a time when “thou” was still a recent memory, Quakers found the “you” takeover elitist, with its overtone of saluting and bowing creating conflict with their egalitarian ideology. I attended a Quaker school for a while in the late 1970s and at least one teacher was still using “thou” in this way — I will never forget him reminding me before an exam, “Be sure to put thy name on thy paper.” However, in the 17th century, Quakers’ insistence on using “thou” even with people of high status felt to many like an insult, and some were even physically assaulted for their refusal to get on the “you” bandwagon.
The Quakers’ beef was with matters of hierarchy, but they were also onto something in the linguistic sense. Normal languages have separate singular and plural second-person pronouns, period. And when a language breaks, its speakers have a way of fixing it. Old English’s pronoun for “she” was “heo,” which sounded so much like “he” that by the time Middle English was widespread in the 1200s, some dialects were using “he” to address both men and women. Yes, even long before the births of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, English was on its way to developing a new gender-neutral pronoun. But apparently that did not feel quite right to many speakers. Thus, speakers recruited one of several words that meant “the” at the time, “seo,” which became today’s “she.”
And English speakers have long since been trying to make the same kind of fix in the second person. A classic example is “youse,” best known in the Northeast United States, which is simply a yeomanly attempt to create a plural form of “you” by adding an “-s.” Stephen Crane made considerable use of a variation of it in his depiction of lower-class speech in New York City in 1893 in “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.” “Come out, all of yehs, come out,” a woman hollers in anger. Interestingly, if Crane’s dialogue is to be trusted, people then were already using “youse” with single people as well, perhaps as an attempt to connote the same discreet distance that burgherly folk in Europe had been using several centuries before: “Ah, youse can’t fight, Blue Billie! I kin lick yeh wid’ one han’.”
Pittsburghers and people from the surrounding region will think of the similar “yinz,” from “you ones.” And then, of course, there is the eternal and lovely “you all,” or “y’all.” But note that all of these forms are considered a tad, well, vulgar. Even if we have a certain affection for them, our feelings about “youse,” “yinz” and “y’all” sit somewhere between those for the Christmas sweater and the drunken uncle. One smiles at their mention. Users chuckle warmly when acknowledging them as part of their speech repertoire.
But why the laughter and dismissal? In Mandarin, “you” in the singular is “ni” and “you” for more than one person is “ni men.” The “men” is a marker of the plural, such that “ni men” literally means “you-s.” And it occasions not the slightest tittle of amusement in Beijing.
Yet “youse,” “yinz” and “y’all” are somehow “not the real thing.” The reason is that language is about more than saying things; we also use it to signal social distinctions. “Y’all,” then, may “mean” the same thing as Mandarin’s “ni men.” But it is also associated with Southern English and perhaps especially Black people, and is thus predictably, if regrettably, barred from admission into the standard English club despite how utterly sensible it is.
This is a common tendency: Language change happens most quickly in casual speech because it isn’t being policed as strictly as standard language. We often don’t even notice changes in casual speech, but in cold print, where language is held still and made to stand up straight, change looks disruptive. Print suggests — and celebrates, in a fashion — permanence.
Thus language change is often associated with being uncouth, unfettered. Believe it or not, the progressive passive, as in “A house is being built across the street,” was considered a vulgar neologism up until the 19th century, as opposed to the earlier “A house is building across the street.” Around the same time, the British statesman William Cobbett was primly recommending that the past of “swim” was “swimmed” and the past of “blow” was “blowed.” To him, “swam” and “blew” were likely seen as marks of low class. Jonathan Swift didn’t like it when ordinary people started shortening the syllable of the “-ed” past suffix the way we now consider standard. He wanted to preserve what we now only know in precious forms like “blessed,” pronounced “bless-id.” If he had had his way we would today be saying “walk-id” and “hugg-id.”
Even on the spread of singular “you,” the Quaker leader George Fox thought of it not only as undemocratic but grammatically unsuitable. In 1660 he wrote a whole, often heated book on the matter, whose prissily didactic title says it all: “A Battle-Door for Teachers & Professors to Learn Singular and Plural; You to Many, and Thou to One; Singular One, Thou; Plural Many, You.”
But eventually all of these new things became normal, whereas this will never happen with “youse,” “yinz” and “y’all.” Their class associations are especially strong, and are felt by pretty much all of the population rather than by just a few pedants. Also, pronouns are especially vivid to a language’s speakers because they stand in for human beings, including ones as immediate as ourselves and the ones we are speaking with. The singular “you” had a certain wind beneath its wings in connoting a certain respect, but blackboard grammar condemned the singular “they” — “Tell each student to hand in their paper” — from the mid-18th century up to our times. Changing gender norms have made many loosen the screws somewhat on that usage, but the newer one, referring to specific individuals — “My boyfriend is coming soon and they want to have sausage pizza” — has occasioned new controversy.
Thus, “y’all,” “youse” and “yinz” will remain casual rather than standard, despite the fact that English seems always to be trying to find some kind of way to indicate plural you-ness. It pops up in interesting corners: I recall how the cartoonist Lynda Barry once had an angry boy complaining to a group, “I hate your gutses anyway,” which I am pretty sure actual people have said. Note the creative pluralization of “guts,” which allows the speaker to directly indicate that he is addressing all of them, in a language that doesn’t provide him with a pronoun to do the job.
“Y’all,” Lynda Barry’s angry boy and, way back, George Fox’s long-titled tome were engaged in repair. English without “thou” has a ding in it. You can likely recall times when you have had to say something amid a group, like “You need to make sure — I mean you all, not just you, Jocelyn — that we make contact with them before Monday.” No one had to pause for little fixes like that when speaking Old or Middle English. It’s a design flaw in the modern language.
And yet notice that no one seems terribly concerned. In contrast to endless attempts to create a brand-new gender-neutral pronoun, such as “ze” or my favorite one, dating all the way back to 1879, “hesh,” there seems to be no push to create a plural “you” pronoun that doesn’t have the class associations of “y’all” and the like. We just accept that in this regard English is pitilessly, eternally and peculiarly unclear.
There is, actually, a lesson in that. If it’s OK that standard English can’t readily distinguish between the singular and plural “you,” then what determines which aspects of our language we single out for criticism and attempt to fix? If we don’t need “thou,” then why all of the agita about using “literally” in a figurative way, when in that case, unlike with “you,” context almost always makes clear what the meaning is without any need for repair? Why sweat about the insouciant redundancy of “irregardless”? Why insist on retaining something as confounding and ongoingly misused as that “lay” is both how you make something “lie” and also the past tense of “lie”? This is the result of an unintended train crash between two words that sounded much less alike 1,000 years ago — but last time I checked we were supposed to keep the distinction going irre— sorry, regardless.
To wit, in the grand scheme of things, what happened in English is an object lesson in how imperfect all languages are, and that this imperfection is both inevitable and harmless. We like our English “you” just the way it is and dismiss all attempts to change it, even though it only got that way because of a creeping notion that everybody should be, as it were, holier than thou. Few things better demonstrate how we can learn to stop worrying and love our language.
Have feedback? Send me a note at McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com.
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism.”
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