Y’all, You’uns, Yinz, Youse: How Regional Dialects Are Fixing Standard English

(via Atlas Obscura)  “You guys” is the most common way Americans refer directly to a group of people; it is a de facto pronoun, duct-taped together. If you remember your high school linguistics, you might also remember that this pronoun would be the second-person plural. (First person is “I,” second person is “you,” third person is “he/she”.) The need for a pronoun to directly refer to a group of people is not a small one, or one that can simply be brushed aside; this is one of the most basic elements of language.  And American English is terrible at it.