yalls

Yalls is a nonstandard, informal form used to refer to a group of people in English. It most often appears as a phonetic rendering of you all or y’all in casual speech and informal writing. In standard English, the plural second-person pronoun is you all, and the possessive forms are you all’s or y’all’s; yalls is generally considered nonstandard. Usage varies by region and community, with some speakers using y’all more frequently and others using yalls in lyrics, memes, or online posts to evoke a dialectal tone.

The term derives from the contraction you all in Southern American English and has spread through popular culture, social media, and online communities. Its spelling variants—y’all, you all, yalls, and y’alls—reflect different attempts to capture pronunciation and register. Because it is informal, yalls appears most often in casual writing, jokes, or demonstrations of dialect rather than in formal contexts.

In addition to its function as a pronoun, yalls occasionally appears as a stylized label or word in online content, sometimes used to create a recognizable voice or persona. There is no single, widely recognized meaning or organization associated with the term; when capitalized or used as an acronym, any such usage is context-dependent and not universal.

See also: y’all, you all, dialect, informal writing, regional varieties of English.