Second Person Plural Forms in World Englishes

Book excerpt: Previously, English used to distinguish between singular and plural second person pronouns. However, this distinction was lost during its transition into Modern English, which saw the establishment of the single form you for both singular and plural reference. Despite this, many dialects of English have always continued to explicitly mark number on second person pronouns by resorting to different linguistic strategies, both morphological and analytic. Among such morphological variants is yous, together with a host of different spelling variants such as youse, yiz, and yez, among others. This work is a synchronic, corpus-based investigation of second person plural forms in 20 varieties of English. The corpus under study here (GloWbe) contains 1.9 billion words collected on the web in 2013 and was analysed in order to uncover the usage trends of second person plural forms in present-day English. The picture that emerges displays the diatopic distribution of the forms, in addition to markers of politeness and empathy, singular-reference emphatic markers, attention-getting devices, and possessive determiner, and their frequencies of occurrence. The book pays particular attention to the fundamental function of second person plural forms in the creation and management of the speaker-hearer relationship.