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Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery research Texas English:
"If you ever find yourself in a group of Southerners and want to spot the Texan in the bunch, listen hard for the y'alls. Most of them will surely use the expression--a contraction of "you all"--to refer to a group of people ("Are y'all goin' to the store?"), but the Texan is more likely to employ it to refer to a single individual as well."
Funny thing about accents: mine is very slight, comparatively. It's enough to make me stand out in certain places, and when I use certain words. ("All right!" becomes "Awl raht!") I went through a phase where I purposely smothered it to fit in. In California. (I cultivated the accent Linda Ellerbee describes as the "I'm not from anywhere" accent.)
" "If the rest of the country says you can't use y'all except for more than one person, then of course we're going to take it and say, no, you can use it for one person," said Tillery (, whose drawling speech bears the marked twang of her childhood home in Lubbock.
"For me it's a conscious effort, because I was treated as such a backwards pea-brain because of how I talked that I decided I would just be very upfront and even more pronounced," she said. "I'll tell you something--it's a good way to hide an intellect." "
As my Pop says, "Don't let the shirtsleeves fool ya."
"If you ever find yourself in a group of Southerners and want to spot the Texan in the bunch, listen hard for the y'alls. Most of them will surely use the expression--a contraction of "you all"--to refer to a group of people ("Are y'all goin' to the store?"), but the Texan is more likely to employ it to refer to a single individual as well."
Funny thing about accents: mine is very slight, comparatively. It's enough to make me stand out in certain places, and when I use certain words. ("All right!" becomes "Awl raht!") I went through a phase where I purposely smothered it to fit in. In California. (I cultivated the accent Linda Ellerbee describes as the "I'm not from anywhere" accent.)
" "If the rest of the country says you can't use y'all except for more than one person, then of course we're going to take it and say, no, you can use it for one person," said Tillery (, whose drawling speech bears the marked twang of her childhood home in Lubbock.
"For me it's a conscious effort, because I was treated as such a backwards pea-brain because of how I talked that I decided I would just be very upfront and even more pronounced," she said. "I'll tell you something--it's a good way to hide an intellect." "
As my Pop says, "Don't let the shirtsleeves fool ya."
