Well, Faye, you are still going back to the late 1960's and things have changed, including wording. Today, there are always people complaining about how others speak/talk. The word "y'all" isn't spoken in Indiana, unless it could be down by the Kentucky border. A lot of people in So California, as already mentioned, will tease a person that has a southern accent and/or says "ya'all". Now, we hardly ever heard a southern accent or "ya'll" in northeastern Florida aka Jacksonville and Florida is southern. Just like how a person looks, an accent can be teased also. Just the way it is today.
Let me resurrect this old thread to prove my memory isn't failing as most, if not all y'all, might suspect. I know @Yvonne Smith is dying to do some thread merging.
I will defer any comment about this to @Shirley Martin or perhaps @Nancy Hart. I don't know anything about boiling hogs or bald-faced liars.
Well, you folks can make fun of "ya'll" and a southern accent all you want, but fact is, it's not like, or even wanted, in some cities/states in America. IOW, that feeling about "we all live in America, why can't we all get along" just doesn't work anymore.
Sorry, you are most definitely wrong! I have high school classmates that live outside Ft. Wayne and they never hear it. And, we hardly ever heard it in Jacksonville, Florida...........and we lived there for 10 1/2 years.
Glad too! What is the topic? A discussion on the word y'all or putting those that use such language in a dimmer light? Three posted pages now and I have yet, to read anything that denotes a common discussion theme. I have no idea what other folks in other areas think about folks that use the word y'all. That seems to be what the opening post was suggesting. Since the word y'all was discussed in another thread that died from lack of interest, I am confused about what the topic is here. The title is "When people say ya'll" and I have never heard anyone say ya'll. Y'all is a contraction of you and all and written as it is pronounced, y'all. The y stands alone and the a is necessary to make the word all. It is pronounced yawl. Just say yawn, but leave the n off and add an l.
The discussion theme is...........how do you feel, and what do you think, when you hear the word "ya'll"/southern accent from someone and it's not common language where you live? Like it or not, Faye, almost everyone gets "put into a dimmer light" for something. I just done a reply, on a Tattoo thread, about a lady, with three kids, that has 90% of her body tattooed. She has been called a bad mother and other things. We all get "put down" for different things.
I grew up in Michigan, lived in Southern California for twelve years, and have been in Maine for the past twenty-two years, and I use "y'all" from time to time, and I didn't pick it up in Texas, since people were more apt to speak Spanish than Southern in the part of the state I lived in.
A lot of the southern talk is from Oklahoma not Texas. Most of Texas was still Mexican and Indian in those pre state days. Of course Oklahoma had people from all over the nation due to the land rush grants. It has to be part of the English language. To be truthful I never heard any Teacher complaint about such language, and most of us could still find our way home after school.
Somehow, I have managed to live 71 years without ever noticing which accents are acceptable or not acceptable in any of the several parts of the country I've lived in. When I first moved to Maine, I couldn't even understand what people were saying when they had a strong Maine accent, but none of these people demanded that I adopt the same accent. After a while, I seldom even noticed the Maine accent anymore, since I now understand that "kwadas" means "quarters", and that sometimes you really can't get there from here. I lived in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas for twenty years without learning passable Spanish, yet I rarely got the idea that anyone was upset with me because I didn't speak Spanish. Then again, I didn't demand that they speak English like some Winter Texans did. I really don't get it, @Cody Fousnaugh. You're certainly welcome to bring it up, but I don't know where you find these people who get angry because you wear a cowboy hat or who would denigrate someone for having an accent or using a different word than they might use. I quit using "pop" to refer to soft drinks, not because it angered anyone that I was from Michigan, but because people didn't know what I meant when I said "pop," but usually people can figure that stuff out. People don't generally care whether someone has an accent, at least not anyone whose opinion I'd value. Oh sure, someone might make fun of an accent from time to time., but nobody takes that stuff seriously. I love accents and regional colloquialisms, and I am saddened that television and streaming media have played a large part in reducing these signs of regional individuality.
Well, Ken, you don't notice what is written on someone's baseball cap or t-shirt either. Bottom Line here is, I notice much more things than you do. Dealing with numerous things, I'm very, very observant and have been. Different phrases/accents, if a person has an accent, are used in different areas of the U.S. Don't you know that Ken? And, like it or not, people in So California don't like southern accents, for whatever reasons. I was coming out of a Post Office, said "good morning" to a person going in and that person looked at me and said "guess you're not from here, because we don't say that here, unless a person is paid to say it." It's just a movie, but watch sometime, The Cowboy Way where to rodeo cowboys from New Mexico drive to NYC to look for a friend of theirs. They walk into the Waldorf Astoria Hotel with their cowboy hats on and people give them a very strange look. Now, why would that be? When they say "Howdy" to the female desk clerk, she says "what?" This is a movie, but a very good one telling the difference between big-city rich folks and a couple of New Mexico rodeo guys. As far as speaking Spanish or other foreign language, there has been lots and lots of debate about that. Now, there are certain cities in the U.S. where speaking a foreign language is fine, like Little Saigon in So California. Why? Because the population is Vietnamese, just like Chinatown in NYC is made up of Chinese and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles is made up of Japanese.
That’s the way it is with old age. Sometimes we notice stuff we never noticed before such as the use of ya’ll in Florida. Jacksonville is nothing more that S. Georgia with another name and ya’ll is used throughout the city. Matter of fact, I have lived All over the state and my x-wife is from Palm Beach and even she said ya’ll just as everyone else did. Yup, I think you’re just getting picky in your old age.