What youse up to?

Hating bogan-speak is one of the principal joys of the middle class, myself included, and for this reason I've always winced at 'youse'. But B and I were talking about it yesterday and I was surprised at the linguistics factoid that youse offers something new to the language - a helpful delineation between you plural and you singular. This was news to me, but remnant Indonesian from year ten sprang back and reminded me our neighbours use 'kami' and 'kita' to demarcate we (exclusive from the person being spoken to) from we inclusive. If Indonesian, a simplified lingua franca trading language can employ this method to boost clarity, perhaps 'youse' is a long-awaited necessity. The poor offering help to the snobbish rich, perhaps, by helping the language evolve. But B - a linguist - felt differently. She argued that even though the word offers a sharp delineation, added complexity is not necessarily better for a language, with more rules to memorise, and given all languages go through periods of complexity-growth and reductionism, rather than 'progressing'. Further, language changes generally occur from the top down, with the trend-savvy rich adopting new speech patterns and word usages (often in order to differentiate themselves from the poor), only to have the new changes filter down to the poor social climbers. So despite seemingly offering a leap forward - and a chance to embrace bogan culture - youse may be doomed, along with the usefully nuanced 'yeah-nah' which seems to be another bogan loan-word. Or perhaps in a time of populism and tabloids, bogan language will have the numbers to change the language - and at last give Australia the cultural certainty it longs for.

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The Sydney Morning Herald fleshes it out here.