Should we use 'youse'?

If you’re anything like me, when you read the Bible you can’t help but notice those little superscript letters and you can’t help but glance down to the footnotes to see what the translators wanted to say about that word or phrase. It can be a bit annoying, and it disrupts the flow of reading. There are a few recurring ones – ‘brothers’ is usually clarified as meaning ‘brothers and sisters’ (and in fact the most recent edition of the NIV has gone back to using the whole phrase ‘brothers and sisters’); weights, measurements, currencies, and times of day are converted for us; and where a proper noun has been used for clarification, the original pronoun is given to us, e.g. where they have inserted ‘Jesus’ instead of just ‘he’. But the one that really gets me is ‘you’ vs. ‘you plural’, and so I want to argue that English needs a second person plural pronoun that has a different form from the singular.

As you know, some varieties of English do have a plural second person pronoun, ‘youse’. Wiktionary, that source of all knowledge, claims that the use of ‘youse’ as a plural form of the second person pronoun ‘is found in Australia, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, parts of the northern United States, and parts of Ontario’. That means it is used fairly widely in those countries where English is spoken as a mother tongue by large numbers of people. As a linguist, I don’t want to criticise that usage but actually say that they’re onto a good thing - and I'm not the only one: Ruth Wajnryb wrote a column in the Sydney Morning Herald a few years ago in support of 'youse'. It’s really a pretty useful word. And logically, it makes sense. In English, all the other pronouns have a singular and plural form – first person pronoun ‘I’ has the plural ‘we’, third person pronouns ‘he/she/it’ have the plural ‘they’, and even demonstrative pronouns ‘this’ and ‘that’ have the plurals ‘these’ and ‘those’. But poor old ‘you’ misses out.

And so we get passages in the Bible like Luke 22:31-32, which reads (in the ESV) ³¹"Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, ³²but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers." But actually it means this: ³¹"Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have youse, that he might sift youse like wheat, ³²but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers." So you can see that having two different forms for singular and plural would really help make the meaning clear, and would also make for less disrupted reading as there wouldn’t need to be a superscript number temping us to look down at the footnotes mid-sentence.

Of course, the use of ‘youse’ is typically reserved for spoken English (or spoken-like English, as in the case of much of the language used in computer mediated communication such as chats, microblogging, etc). Even if the use of ‘youse’ takes off in more mainstream spoken English, I imagine it would be a very long time before it became acceptable in written English, especially in formal and academic registers. But the point remains: that it would be very useful to have a differentiated form of the plural second person in both spoken and written forms. And so I would like to say: ‘Youse should consider using ‘youse’!’

[Adapted from a 3-minute ‘Persuade Me’ talk I did at a ministry training session, October 2011.]

Different values, stylistically speaking

The other night I did something I hadn’t done before – I watched an episode of ‘So you think you can dance Australia’. I know nothing about dance and can’t really do it myself, but, I bet like other non-dancers who watch it, I sort of catch the dancing vibe and feel like doing little jigs in the living room after getting caught up in it. It’s quite refreshing how generally encouraging the judges are (although still encouraging an unhealthy self-absorption), compared to other programs that run on a similar model.

There was a guy on there who was older than most of the other contestants – 31 I think – who had been out of the dancing scene for a while. He was criticised for using moves that were outdated. The moves that he imagined would be appropriate to use in a dancing audition and give him a chance of getting through to the next round were not valued as highly by the judges. His repertoire of dance moves was fairly restricted so these particular moves held a different value for him than for the judges, who had been continually exposed to new moves and combinations of moves in all kinds of different dance genres. The moves he used in his audition were identified by the judges as moves you learn as part of training in a particular genre and then move beyond as you continue to train and learn more complex moves. They were expecting dancing at a level of sophistication and development that he didn’t produce because he didn’t understand what the judges would value in a routine.

A similar lesson is going to be one of the central concepts I’ll be teaching my students this semester in the ‘effective written communication’ course. Most of us use a range of styles and genres and language in the course of our lives, and each of these styles may be valued in its appropriate context. Academic writing is a particular kind of written communication that is unlike everyday communication in a number of ways. One of the most important ways is the value it holds in the academic context. In order to ‘impress the judges’ in an academic context, you need to know what patterns of language use are highly valued in the context and how to use them appropriately. Like dancing, it takes reflection, training from those who have mastered it, and practice.