- Yo
""Yo" is an American English
slang interjection . It was highly popularized after being commonly used amongItalian American s andAfrican American s inPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania .cite book
last=Dalzell
first=Tom
title=Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang
year=1996
publisher=Merriam Webster
location=Springfield, Massachusetts
isbn=0-87779-612-2]Usage
Although often used as a
greeting , like the wordhey , it may have a wide range of other, subtler meanings that depend on the tone, context, and situation. Two prominent examples include:*"Yo" has also come to be used as an
exclamation at the end of a sentence, either to direct focus onto a particular individual or group, "It is a really hot day, yo", or to strengthen meaning to a particular point, "This hot dog is good, yo!". TheJapanese language sentence-final particle "yo" has approximately the same meaning, but is etymologically unrelated.There are also reports of students in
Baltimore consistently using "yo" as agender-neutral pronoun . [cite web
year=2008
url=http://www.bignewsday.com/story.asp?code=BZ345203T&news=yo_being_used_as_gender-neutral_pronoun
title='Yo' Being Used As 'Gender-Neutral Pronoun'
work=Big News Day
publisher=Global News likes
language=English
accessdate=2008-01-07
accessyear=]Unrelated terms
In addition to the unrelated
Japanese language sentence-final particle "yo", there are several other unrelatedhomophones orhomographs of yo which have different meanings andetymologies .* In the
Spanish language , the word for thefirst person personal pronoun "I" is "yo", but this is completely unrelated to the modern colloquial Englishmorpheme yo. The Spanish pronoun "yo", the English pronoun "I" and others such as French "je", German "ich" and Latin "ego" all derive from aProto Indo-European pronoun "eǵ".* The English second person
possessive pronoun "your" is often pronounced in truncated form, such as "yo" or "ya". This usage has been popularized by the many dozens jokes and snaps that begin with "Yo momma...". These jokes have spread from the urban African American community and now relatively widespread throughout the English-speaking world, taking along this pronunciation of "your " with it.References
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