Regional claims on "yeah no / no yeah"

August 21, 2024 @ 7:38 am · Filed by under Dialects

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For some reason, people from different social groups in different regions all over the world believe that saying (things similar to) "yeah no" and "no yeah" is their special thing.

Maybe it's a New York thing:

Or maybe it's part of "How to Speak Midwest":

Today I'm gonna teach you how to speak Midwestern.
First thing you need to learn is the ABCs,
which in the midwest is the yeah-no-yeah.

But really, it's a feature of California English?

Or maybe it's Australians (Erin Moore, "Yeah-No: A Discourse Marker in Australian English" Honours thesis, Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, The University of Melbourne, 2007; and other publications).

Or uneducated British millennials from Bristol…

Or maybe it's U.S. young people in general ("Yeah no", 4/3/2008):

Or Afrikaans and South African English.

Also the analogous phrasing in Romanian, Russian, and no doubt many other languages…

And "Yeah, no, well, in fact 'yeah no' is pretty much the thematic idiom of NPR."

Wiktionary has an entry citing Australia, New Zealand, California, and Upper Midwestern U.S. 

 

August 21, 2024 @ 7:38 am · Filed by under Dialects


12 Comments

  1. languagehat said,

    August 21, 2024 @ 8:10 am

    From your penultimate link:
    PF commented on Language Hat's site: "Да нет, on the other hand, means extra no. Odd."

    I couldn't comment back in those bygone days, so I'll point out now that this is unrelated to the "yeah no" theme; this is not да 'yes' but да 'and; but.'

  2. Roscoe said,

    August 21, 2024 @ 9:00 am

    See also: “We don’t say ‘Did you eat yet?’ We say ‘Jeet jet?’”

  3. C Baker said,

    August 21, 2024 @ 10:00 am

    Well, I didn't previously think this was a regional thing, but now I feel like I need to grab it as my own personal identity marker. This is a phrasing unique to left-handers!

  4. BZ said,

    August 21, 2024 @ 10:56 am

    @languagehat,
    I think it's more the intensifier да (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B4%D0%B0#Pronunciation_6_2_
    p.s. How dol you create links from comments?

  5. BZ said,

    August 21, 2024 @ 10:56 am

    I meant https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B4%D0%B0#Pronunciation_6_2

  6. Yves Rehbein said,

    August 21, 2024 @ 12:26 pm

    @Roscoe, so does Russian, where есть (jestʹ) means "eat".

    Same goes for Elfdalian, Gutnish, Luxemburgish with various cognates of eat, German in the north where the ge-participle perfect may be pronounced j /y/, as it is, incidently, in English, Middle English yeten, OE (ġe)eten, not in Dutch it seems (gegeten), but in Hittite, for the sake of the argument, with ēzz(a)zzi where cuneiform GEŠ, GIŠ, IS, IZ appears to be from the Akkadian translation iṣum "wood" (PSem. *ʕiṣ́-) for Sumerian ĝeš .

    Ugh, sorry, I'm just horsin around

  7. Yves Rehbein said,

    August 21, 2024 @ 12:30 pm

    … that is the cuneiform sign shown here https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%92%84%91

  8. Y said,

    August 21, 2024 @ 1:34 pm

    BZ: "How do you create links from comments?"

    Use a href tag within the comment.

  9. AntC said,

    August 21, 2024 @ 4:35 pm

    Wiktionary has an entry citing Australia, …

    Australia has the most strident form IMO, and it's where I first heard it deployed. YEAH NAH T-Shirt (strong language advisory). Ozzy Man has many Youtube videos using the title (further strong language advisories).

  10. Viseguy said,

    August 22, 2024 @ 12:09 am

    @BZ: Tangentially (and pedantically), you can also create links to comments (да конечно! as distinct from да, конечно!), by right-clicking on the comment's time stamp and copying the link. For example,
    https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=65564#comment-1621420

  11. Aardvark Cheeselog said,

    August 22, 2024 @ 11:53 am

    A joke from the '80s

    ENGLISH PROFESSOR: So, we see there are several ways to indicate a positive assertion though the use of the double negative. Interestingly, there is no converse where a double positive can negate an assertion."

    STUDENT IN THE BACK: Yeah, right.

  12. Mark Liberman said,

    August 23, 2024 @ 7:22 am

    @Aardvark Cheeselog:

    See "Double positives", 4/4/2011.

    And for more from the same source, "If P, so why not Q?", 8/5/2004; and "Morgenbesserisms", 2/15/2010.

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