Why do people try to turn the second person pronoun ‘you’ into a plural by saying ‘yous’?
The short answer is—because they don’t know any better.
But there is a longer, historical, and (I think) quite interesting answer.
Until the 1600s the second person pronoun had two forms— ‘thou’ in the singular and ‘ye’ for the plural.
So back in those days if you were talking to some person you could say ‘This is something thou can do.’
But if it’s a group of people the expression would become ‘…this is something ye can do.’
That was, as I said, up until the 1600s.
But in the course of that century—for reasons that are not entirely clear—all of the different, older, versions of the second person pronoun (‘thou’, ‘thee’, ‘thy’, ‘thine’ and the rest) just went away.
People stopped using them.
And what people use is what the English language is.
All that was left was ‘ye.’
And then it appears that over the 1700s the vowel sound changed and ‘ye’ became ‘you.’
That means that today our familiar word ‘you’ is grammatically plural.
But it has clearly ended up being used for both the plural and the singular.
That created a problem for people who didn’t understand that.
Not having sat through the history lesson I’ve just given you they thought that ‘you’ was singular and it was someone’s job to create a plural form—so that did the usual thing when creating a plural, they added an ‘S’ and they got the word ‘yous.’
The Oxford says that form is used in Scotland, parts of the United States and Australia.
It seems to have been coined about 1835—or, at least, that’s the first time anyone has found it appearing in print.
And it remains relatively rare— ‘yous’ occurs about 0.05 times per million words in modern written English.
It is what we politely call ‘non-standard’ so if you don’t want to sound like a dope, don’t use it.
Tonight I will join Peta Credlin on Sky News for 'Words Matter.'
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