You are? You's?

[nq:1]I read the book "Sonny's blues" yesterday.And I found these wierdsentences. "But you got to let him knows you's there" How can I account for this sentence?[/nq]
This is an attempt to write ungrammatical
spoken dialect. Some Americans and
some British actually say this. (Many
authors write dialect for direct speech
and avoid it elsewhere.)
[nq:1]And I also don't unders

Old can of worms time...does "non-standard" equate to "ungrammatical" spoken dialect?
The dialect is definitely spoken and non-standard, but I suspect that within the conventions of that particular dialect it's behaving in a grammatically consistent manner.

Cheers, Harvey
Ottawa/Toronto/Edmonton for 30 years;
Southern England for the past 21 years.
(for e-mail, change harv

[nq:1]On 04 Apr 2004, Don Phillipson wrote[/nq]
[nq:2]sentences. This is an attempt to write ungrammatical spoken dialect.[/nq]
[nq:1]Old can of worms time...does "non-standard" equate to "ungrammatical" spoken dialect? The dialect is definitely spoken and non-standard, but I suspect that within the conventions of that particular dialect it's behaving in a grammatically consistent manner.[

[nq:2]On 04 Apr 2004, Don Phillipson wrote Old can of ... that particular dialect it's behaving in a grammatically consistent manner.[/nq]
[nq:1]I guess the original sentence could be more (in)correctly written "But you's got to let him knows you's there" (?)[/nq]
Correctly pronounced only if the speaker is speaking to more than one person, and only if the form of the second

[nq:1]Correctly pronounced only if the speaker is speaking to more than one person, and only if the form of the ... if the nonstandard second person plural form is "y'all," for example, "y'all" will not beused when addressing a single individual.[/nq]
A bit off-topic, but there *is* a plural form of "y'all." It's "all y'all." "Y'all" can be used of a group or of a single individual, at

There was a discussion in the Linguist List, at
http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-720.html
nothing difinitive, but it might be of interest to the people reading this thread. Among other things posters mention variations of the second person pronoun which have not yet been mentioned in this thr

[nq:1]Not at all. It lead me to do more research on the matter.[/nq]
Do you mean to imply you plumbed the question deeply? One might fathom as much ... Sorry, I just had to sound off, and a mere "Oy!" didn't seem sufficient.

Odysseus

In my experience, "youse" has always been a dialectal plural of "you." My father, who grew up in the upper penninsula of Michigan said this constantly. It's a very popular word among hicks in the midwest U.S. They think "you" can only apply to one person.
And don't suggest you're not adding any value, Sara. You were the first person to actually answer the original poster's question, by pointin

[nq:2]Not at all. It lead me to do more research on the matter.[/nq]
[nq:1]Do you mean to imply you plumbed the question deeply? One might fathom as much ... Sorry, I just had to sound off, and a mere "Oy!" didn't seem sufficient.[/nq]
Because of Sara's post, I researched the matter via the Internet and found out several things I had not known before, including that "y'all's" is the posses

[nq:1]And don't suggest you're not adding any value, Sara. You were the first person to actually answer the original poster's ... a contraction for "you is." The poor guy just wanted to know what "you's" meant, and nobody would tell him.[/nq]
You mean there was an actual point to all this?? heh heh!

(clears throat and adjusts glasses) Ahem...the dialectic "youse" is a contraction of "