Youse wash the dishes
This heading is part of a narrative told to me during a fieldwork session by a
Belfast working-class woman. The rest of it, which may serve as an illustration
of vernacular second person pronoun usage, is as follows:
(I) /So I says to our Trish and our Sandra/youse wash the dishes/and I
might as well have said you wash the dishes/for our Trish just got
up/and put her coat on and walked out/
In much of Scotland and Ireland the second person pronoun can be marked
for number as illustrated here, giving the plural form youse. This extract is
quoted here because it shows clearly that the speaker considers you an
inappropriate choice for a plural referent. This fact is relevant to analysis of
subsequent miscommunications between myself and some Belfast vernacular
speakers.
An examination of the sociolinguistic distribution of youse in Belfast
reveals rather more complexity than might at first be assumed. First of all, as
we might expect, many relatively standardized speakers have categorical
you for both singular and plural pronouns. For these speakers, the youse
form is high I y stigmatized (despite the obvious usefulness of the distinction),
and is often singled out for overt criticism. As a consequence of this stigma
many speakers who do have the you/youse distinction in their grammars
alternate between the marked and the unmarked form of the plural pronoun
according to various contextual (and possibly syntactic) constraints. For
example, one local post-graduate student was observed to address the class
as you while giving a seminar paper, but to revert to youse as the class broke
up and the topic changed. Thus the pronoun appears to be a classic social
and stylistic variable rather similar to, for example, the double negative. It
has of course quite a different sociolinguistic distribution from the T and V
pronouns studied by Brown and Gilman.
The really surprising fact to emerge during a lengthy and systematic study
of the language of several very low-status social groups in Belfast was that
many speakers categorically distinguished you (singular) and youse (plural);
that is. evidence began to build up which suggested that they never alternated
between the marked and the unmarked form of the pronoun.
This sociolinguistic distribution might be diagrammed as in Table I, with
three different groups of speakers distinguished, which are likely to correspond
to hierarchical social stratifications. What is of interest here is the
communicative consequence when a Group I speaker and a Group Ill
speaker interact. Do categorical differences in this portion of their grammars
result in communicative difficulties? Or do Group I I I speakers have the kind