Y’all is a contraction of you all, and is used as a second person, plural, pronoun. The Southern United States is well known as the place of origin of this word, but it seems that
y’all has an even longer history. There is a good argument tto be made that
y’all was brought to the United States by the Scots-Irish with the term
ye aw, as there was a large influx of Scots-Irish immigrants into the United States over the late 1700s and 1800s.
A
yawl is a sailing ship with two masts, with the mizzenmast set far off the main mast.
Yawl appears in the 1660s, from the German word
jolle or the Dutch word
jol, meaning a Jutland boat.