In yesterday's post, I looked at how the concept of war has been broached in the lyrics of songs that have populated the Billboard year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2014), finding that the topic is addressed rarely in pop music. Today, I take on a set of words with a bit more currency in the collection, by focusing on plural forms of the second person pronoun you.

Given the emphasis on personal relationships in pop songs, it might not be surprising that pronouns have appear relatively frequently in a collection of pop lyrics. Indeed, an examination of all the words in the collection that I am using shows the two top-ranking words to be I and you, with the former being used 10,123 times in 576 songs (out of 640, which include several instrumentals), and the latter 10,113 times in 575 songs (totals include contracted forms, such as I'll and you've in their counts). The frequent reference to the second person in the collection raises the issue of ambiguity between singular and plural uses that has plagued the English language since the loss of singular thou in the Modern English period, which is illustrated by the following figure.

That loss, and the apparent value of and need for distinct singular and plural forms of the second person pronoun, as evidenced by its survival in other languages of the world, has given rise to several ways of marking the plural second person pronoun in English, often along regional lines. For instance, throughout the United States one can find you guys being used as the plural form of you, and in smaller geographical pockets of the country youse and you'uns.

Perhaps none of these forms, however, has received as much attention as the preferred variant of plural you in the South: y'all, particularly in its unlikely spread from southern speech into other areas of the country, where it is often associated with African American Vernacular English and, at times, with "language of the streets" (Rambsy and Whiteside 2015).

In an analysis of plural you in my top ten collection, y'all figures prominently in those cases in which it is marked. In fact, it was the only variant found among those that explicitly marker for plural, as a search for you guys, youse, you'uns, and yinz, as well as you two, you three, etc., turned up no hits in the collection at all. This would suggest that y'all is clearly the preferred marked form of plural you used in popular music of the last 60-odd years.

As seen in the figure, y'all appears infrequently in songs of the Billboard year-end Top Ten in the 1960s and '70s, and disappears completely in the 1980s, before picking up steam in the '90s and reaching, perhaps, its highest use, both in total uses and the number of songs it appears in, in the aughts. Thus far, the appearance of y'all seems to be on the decline in 2010s, but it remains to be seen if of the variation will rise again in pop music in the second half of the decade.

These videos showcase the Top Ten songs with the highest number of y'all uses in their respective decades:

References

Rambsy, Howard, Jr. and Brianna Whiteside. (2015). "African American Language and Black Poetry." In Sonja L. Lanehart (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of African American Language, pp. 706-722. Oxford: Oxford University Press.