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Origin: Often incorrectly attributed to the contraction of "you + all," the word actually originated from the fusing of "ya + all." The kind of fella who would say ya'll for the first time would not be enunciating a clean and crisp "you" in his daily speech. "You" wasn't in his spoken vocabulary, but "ya" was. Now, try to say "ya all." It is actually not easy to do as two separate words. To say it with a normal cadence, it already almost sounds like ya'll, but with the slightest stutter. "Ya all" quite naturally slips into the familiar pronoun we all use. Ya + all = ya'll. When you look at it that way, the placement of the apostrophe after the "a" makes sense. Alternately, you + all = y'all. However, the ya + all transition more naturally illustrates the origin of "ya'll." "You all" is cumbersome, although that is usually how yall is explained to uninitiated Yankees, whose experience with "ya" is often limited. "You all" just doesn't lead to the inevitable ya'll that "Ya all" does.
ya'll - The correct spelling for the commonly misspelled word, y'all. The word originates in the south-eastern United States and is a contraction formed from the words 'ya' and 'all,' the 'ya' being the short-form of you. The apostrophe is placed after the a because in contractions, letters are removed from the second word, and thus, y'all is gramatically incorrect, leaving ya'll as the proper method of spelling the word.
Exactly right.
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