From what I've heard up north it's "yous guys" instead of ya'll. Sounds even dumber, but then again, language is dumb period. Try to learn a language...any languagel, they are all dumb. They all have stupid rules.
i've never understood the problem northern people have with y'all. it isn't like we did something new. we used two normal words and made a contraction. now "fixin to" i can see. you replace "about to" with a word that doesn't mean anything close to "about." but y'all just seems like a natural thing everyone would do. i use both phrases. i say y'all all the time, fixin to only occasionally. i'm sure i have a little drawl on some of my words but i don't have any serious west/east/panhandle accents going on. i would like to do what some of y'all are talking about and go north or somewhere and see if they think i have a big accent. of course i would get back to texas as fast as i could after the experiment.
I don't have an extremely heavy accent but it's enough for the yanks up here to look at me funny from time to time. I say "y'all" "howdy" "I reckon" and my personal favorite "I'm about fixin' to". I've noticed a lot of native New Englanders say y'all as well and not you guys or youse guys. I've got quite the contingent of friends who call me Tex and make fun of my boots and country music tastes. The radio stations up here suck donkey balls I'd kill to be able to get K-Star on my radio.
I've been to Colorado skiing and they couldn't tell that we were from Texas when we spoke (in fact they didn't believe us) The people in Florida had thicker accents than my family did and we are all native Texans. The funniest thing to see is my extended families reaction to hearing my wife speak. She was born in Asia but came over when she was 2 or 3. She has a Texas accent and can get very hicky when need be. They have this really puzzled look on their faces when they ask "Now your from where now?" It's even funnier to see the reactions of the ones that have talked to her on the phone but never met her and don't know she is Asian.
A southern man is sitting on a plane near three beautiful young ladies who appear to be from up north somewhere. He says to one of the ladies, "Where y'all from?" One of the ladies snobbishly says, "We are from a place that doesn't use prepositions at the end of sentences". The man then says, "OK, where y'all from, b****?"
While I use some of the southern vocabulary, I don't really have an accent (except when I say the word 'accent,' oddly enough). When I went to Chicago for college, no one remarked on the way I spoke. I was chatting with a prof who asked where I was from (in a making-conversation sort of way) and I told her Houston. She was suprised and said I didn't have an accent. I told her Houston is the 4th largest city in the country and it wasn't like I was from some podunk backwoods cattle-town. It came out a little harsher than I had meant it. I guess I had my guard up, being in the North. My father, on the other hand, has a very strong Texan accent. You should hear him speak French -- it's a travesty.
I met a French girl (in France, duh!) who told me that when she was a little girl and was playing with dolls, she would give them American accents because they were considered sexy.
Yankees annoy me when they call Cokes or Mellow Yellows or any other soft drink, "pop". I would not be caught dead walking around saying, "Yo, man, you have some pop??" I mean how can you tell what they really want?? It is not like they are saying, "I want a Coca-Cola pop." It is just pop.
It's better than calling every soda "Coke"... "Hey, could you get me a coke?" "Sure, what do you want?" "A Dr. Pepper"
But Running With Scissors (always wanted to address you like that), every time I hear "pop", I think of my dad and not a Coke or Mellow Yellow or Dr Pepper, etc. But yea, calling Dr Pepper or Mellow Yellow, etc. a Coke is stupid, too.
In Michigan, we called it "pop." In New Jersey, we called it "soda." By the time I got to Texas, I didn't know what the hell to call it anymore. That's probably why I just stick with water now.
I call everything a coke. It's just the way I was raised. I've had that precise conversation a million times in my life.
I've always wondered where my accent and the words I use come from. My parents came from Mexico and Nicaragua, so I didn't learn english from them. I remember watching videos as a little kid that tought spanish to english. They worked damn well though because I don't have a hint of the accent that kids I knew growing up in similar situations had. Whenever the coke vs pop argument comes up, I always wonder why people can't say soda? There is a hint of the drawl in my accent from time to time, and I know I say fixin to as well as ya'll all the time.
