'Imagine you’re strolling through a park and you overhear a middle-aged couple cooing over each other, doting over their “wittle sugar pwum” and “baby doll.”

“Ewwww,” you might reflexively think.

#BabyTalk is cute when grown-ups dote on babies. But when adults converse with each other? Not so much.'

Yet as many as 2/3 of couples do it, and it's correlated with strong relationships.

https://theconversation.com/why-do-couples-use-baby-talk-with-one-another-171361
#language #LanguageMastodon #Psychology #Romance

Y'all listening?

Y'all as a second-person plural pronoun is not just “the quintessential Southern pronoun.” A linguist has found uses going back to 1631 in England, hundreds of years before the more recent usages cited by the Oxford English Dictionary.

And its inclusiveness is also gaining new respect, you hear?

https://theconversation.com/yall-that-most-southern-of-southernisms-is-going-mainstream-and-its-about-time-193265

#pronouns #YAll #LanguageMastodon #Etymology #words
(Edit:slight garble)