is the editor of Currents

I live in the land of youse - meaning Philly, meaning Jersey. I hear it coming from many lips, including mine. And guess what? Youse is more than just a regionalism. It's part of a grassroots movement, nationwide, to fill a big gap in the English language.

Youse often comes with guys, as in youse guys. Though it's often associated with Italian working-class people in Eastern cities, you'll find it in western New York state and parts of what is known as the Inland North and New England. It may come from speech patterns of Irish immigrants.

English is a streamlined language, one of the reasons for its success. One of the bags it tossed overboard was complicated, changing pronouns. Other languages (German, Greek, Russian, Hindi, etc.) change them things around all anyways, but English keeps them to a minimum. All we have, in Standard English anyway, is you. If there's one of you, it's you. If there are three million of you, it's you. If I know and cherish you and hold you close, it's you. If you are as strange to me as Sweeney Todd, it's you.

Isn't that sad? In streamlining, we've sacrificed something - a way to show our relation to you and honor it in our language.

We used to have such a way. As Spanish has tú (informal) and Usted (formal), as German has du (my babycake!) and Sie (do I know you?), English-speakers used to have thou and you. If you called a person thou, you were signaling a closeness, or some other special relation.

William Labov, professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the world's foremost students of American dialects, tells me that "the youse form is one of many efforts to solve this problem, which is that a form has disappeared, something we had in Shakespeare's time but is lost now. Just why we lost it is something of a mystery."

I miss thou. It's just about gone now; in the 1970s, when I lived in England, I did hear it, in the far north, where oldsters still said, "Where hast tha been?" for "Where have you been?"

That's where youse comes in: It's an effort to plug this hole in the language. When people use youse, they're talking to folks they're comfortable with, people with whom they feel familial, friendly, accepted, safe. As Labov points out, youse can mark the youser as being from a particular place, class, ethnicity or group. But it's also a way of telling the yousees that "I am close with you and want you to know it." Hey, youse guys! What yuz doin'?

Other American regions and subcultures are doing the same thing more and more. Note the yuz and a yuns in mid- and far-west Pennsy. And let us now celebrate the Southern you all and you'uns, and, of course, y'all.

These forms are spreading like a bushfire. In the last 30 years or so, the North shrank by about 20 percent, and the South grew by close to the same amount, spreading you all farther and wider. As for y'all, rap and hip-hop have spread it to people of all colors, backgrounds and bank accounts. In a 2000 study in the Journal of English Linguistics, Jan Tillery, Tom Wikle and Guy Bailey argue that y'all should now be considered, not just a regionalism, but part of informal American English, period. And so it should. They say the spread has accelerated in the past 25 years, especially among younger speakers. Rap, hip-hop, the rise of the South, it's all in there.

Wow - add youse, yuz, yiz, yuns, yinz, you'uns, you all and y'all together and what do yuz have? Millions and millions of Americans saying, "I like how it feels to let groups of people know I accept them and hope they accept me."

Call it the youse movement!

It amounts to a reaction against the sterilizing tendency of Standard English. It builds a home in the lap of language.

When youse escapes my lips (all by itself - I never try to use it), I'm feeling good about the yousee.

And I feel good when I'm included in a youse or a y'all. Looks like all America agrees. We've given the American language a way to say, "Youse are all welcome here."

Listen to a radio version of this column, as part of a new partnership between The Philadelphia Inquirer and WHYY-FM (90.9):

http://go.philly.com/youse

at 215-854-4406 or jtimpane@aol.com.