"Welcome in!"

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I'm in the little (population about two hundred) town of Wamsutter in southwest Wyoming.  It's just west of the Continental Divide and bills itself as "The Gateway to the Red Desert".  It is the largest settlement, and the only incorporated town in the Great Divide Basin.

The name Wamsutter is intriguing, but it doesn't sound Native American, like so many other toponyms in Wyoming.  As a matter of fact, Wamsutter was originally known as Washakie (c.1804/1810 – February 20, 1900) after the formidable Shoshone chief, but was later changed to its current name due to confusion with nearby Fort Washakie. No great loss for the Shoshone leader, since so many other places and things in Wyoming are named after him, including the excellent student dining center at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, in front of which stands a most impressive statue of the chief on his horse.  When the town decided to switch its name, at least they retained the initial "Wa" of the original designation, which reminds me of "The Good Old Song" of the University of Virginia, with its "Wah-hoo-wa" cheer, borrowed from Dartmouth.

Wamsutter is the surname of a Union Pacific bridge engineer, but that's not what I want to write about today.  Instead, I will talk about a thought-provoking experience I had at one of the three big gas stations / truck stops that seem to constitute the raison d'être for the town in its present manifestation.  (Earlier it would have been a stage coach stop, and in medieval Central Asia it would have been a caravanserai filled with Sogdian traders and their stinking, drooling camels.)

The three stations / stops are One9, Love's, and Conoco.  I went in all three to get supplies and food.  While I was in the One9, I was puzzled by the frequent shouts of the employees that punctuated the bustling atmosphere of the shoppers and drivers coming and going.  "Eh Uh Ih!"   "Eh Uh Ih!"  (Don't forget that I have tinnitus, which causes one to lose most consonants.)

I really didn't know what they were saying, and I was dying with curiosity to know what it was.  Curiosity got the better of the cat, so I went up and asked one of the workers what it was.

"Welcome in!" he said.  I almost fell over, both because of my perplexity at not understanding it in the first place and because of my instant realization the it was the exact analog of the ubiquitous Japanese greeting, "irasshaimase".  The latter is invariably translated as "welcome", but it literally means "(please) come (in)".  Thus the One9 employees' greeting "Welcome in!" is an ingenious combination of "welcome" and "(please) come (in)", with an emphasis on the adverb.  We'll have to ask Master Grammarian Geoff Pullum exactly what "in" is doing in the phrase "Welcome in".

Curosity continued to get the better of the cat, so I asked one of the One9 employees if he and his coworkers were instructed by their manager to call out "Welcome in!" to each customer who entered the store.  He replied, "Yep!  Meet and greet."  The cat pursued, "Is this company policy at all One9 travel centers?"  "Yes," he acknowledged.  "It's not just a local thing."

By the way, One9 is owned by Berkshire Hathaway. They know how to do business.

After I filled up my tank and was about to head down the road to Rock Springs, I looked up and noticed this large sign above the entrance to the One9 store:  WELCOME.

 

Selected readings



37 Comments »

  1. Lillie Dremeaux said,

    September 9, 2024 @ 9:04 am

    I first had "Welcome in!" addressed to me as I walked into an upscale retail chain in a mall in Westchester County, N.Y., maybe about six years ago. After that, I heard it at other high-end shops, instead of the usual "Welcome" … and then I moved out of the country for a while. It seems to have become more widespread since.

  2. Gregory Kusnick said,

    September 9, 2024 @ 10:42 am

    Six years sounds about right. Where I live now in California it seems to have become the standard greeting in shops and restaurants of all sorts.

    Wamsutta is a Native American name; he was the eldest son of Massasoit. Among other things, a New England textile manufacturer, a posh country club, and a US Navy steamship were named after him. It's not inconceivable that your bridge engineer's surname derives from Wamsutta as well.

  3. Michèle Sharik Pituley said,

    September 9, 2024 @ 3:00 pm

    Several years ago, when I was visiting my German family in Sögel, we spent some time strolling the grounds of Schloß Clemenswerth. Several (Most?) of the signs there are in multiple languages, including English.

    One sign said "Welcome in Schloß Clemenswerth!" and I commented "oh, that should say 'welcome TO' not 'welcome IN'". My cousin Rolf (who is German and speaks English, but has never lived in a primarily English-speaking country), said, "No, 'welcome in' is correct." I replied, "It depends on the usage. I would say 'you are welcome in my home', but when meeting you at the door, I would say 'welcome to my home'."

    He continued to argue with me about it, which doesn't surprise me; he *is* my family, after all, and we all come by it honestly. :-)

  4. Not a naive speaker said,

    September 9, 2024 @ 3:09 pm

    From my copy of Wyoming place Names Mae Urbanek

    Wamsutter, Sweetwater: the original name was Washakie; this caused much confusion, because freight for Fort Washakie was often sent here; so the name was changed in 1884 or 1885 to Wamsutter, for a German bridge builder on the UP railroad.
    Turritella agates are scattered over dry prairies south of Wamsutter. These agatized shells were once the homes of life in marshy flats or lakes here. "Turris" is Latin for tower; the tiny shells twist like miniature towers. Millions of shells are weathered out of their matrices. Turritella agates are excellent for sawing and polishing.

  5. Jongseong Park said,

    September 9, 2024 @ 7:50 pm

    We can often see French speakers saying "Welcome in France" instead of "Welcome to France" as a result of literally translating "Bienvenue en France". I suspect speakers of several other languages are prone to doing the same thing in English.

    You would never hear French speakers say "Welcome in" by itself (unless they learned this phrase in English) because "Bienvenue en" must always be followed by the place that one is welcoming the other to.

  6. JPL said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 1:10 am

    So what is the grammatical function of "in" here? It's not a preposition with ellipsis ("Welcome in our store."), or a particle in a verb-particle construction. (as with "come in", since, even though "welcome" is not a verb, it is anyway an act of greeting done by the speaker, not the addressee. The sense could be expressed more fully as "You've come in! Welcome!") So how does it work?

  7. eli said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 1:58 am

    I've heard this a lot in the past 5 years too, but never before that. Was definitely taken by surprise the first time I ever had it said to me – in Seattle, pretty sure, at some point before COVID. I don't use the construction myself (I'd just say "Welcome!") and it still feels borderline "off" to me; not fully ungrammatical or anything, but in the same category as "How do you mean?" I'd say. As a resident of Japan now, that's a great connection to the Japanese いらっしゃいませ, which never crossed my mind!

  8. RfP said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 2:31 am

    @JPL

    I am by no means a grammarian, but isn’t this usage of “in” functionally equivalent to the “aboard” in “Welcome aboard”? (Which seems to be an adverb)

  9. RfP said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 2:39 am

    And now that I think of it, “welcome aboard“ used to be a common expression used to greet new employees at a company.

    I’m not sure if this was primarily used by people who had a nautical background, but it was meant in a similar fashion, As a “homey“ welcome.

  10. Yves Rehbein said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 4:40 am

    @RfP not a grammarian either, I'd say it's closer to welcome on minus board ;)

    To add to the puzzle, Dutch agrees with English and French but Norse agrees with Low German and German on the ending, e.g. Icelandic velkominn. Perhaps this is due to French influence?

  11. Julian said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 6:16 am

    'Welcome in': I would call 'in' a preposition heading a preposition phrase which in this case happens to have no other complement (according to the expansive definition of 'preposition' vis-a-vis adverb and conjunction advocated in the 2002 Cambridge Grammar of the English Language).
    Analogously to 'Come in.'

  12. Victor Mair said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 7:12 am

    @eli

    Thank you for taking my suggestion about irasshaimase seriously.

    There in a cavernous truck stop in the middle of the southwest Wyoming desert, I did feel as though I had been transported into a lively shop in Tokyo or Osaka or Yokohama.

    And thank you to those who pegged the advent of "Welcome in" to the West Coast about 5-6 years ago. Lots of Japanese establishments there.

    I once went in Uwajimaya in Seattle about 20-30 years ago and it had that kind of Nipponified atmosphere. Also countless shops and stores in Japantown in LA. Maybe some of this Japanese etiquette / rhetoric / buzz finally rubbed off on the Americanss who frequent those places.

    And thank you as well to those who question the grammar of that postposition "in" in "Welcome in!" as being "off".

  13. John Swindle said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 7:33 am

    On the island of ʻOahu in Hawaiʻi thereʻs a town called Wahiawā. "Wah-hoo-wa" would be a better-than-average tourist pronunciation. Otherwise it's four syllables, pronounced in English with either primary or (less commonly) secondary stress on the first. Itʻs a Hawaiian name which I see translated online as "place of the wa people" (?) or "place of noise." I think it would work as fake Japanese.

    "Welcome in!" is fine and sounds like "Well, come in!" (Well, come on in! Set yourself right down.) "Welcome into!" would be incomplete. "Welcome into [something]" is imaginable in limited circumstances. For analysis please imagine hands waving.

  14. Jonathan Smith said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 9:24 am

    The Welcome ("Welcome [to PLACE]!", etc.) is kindof a speech act island to begin with so hard to apply syntax to… cf. the Thank, the Goodbye, etc.

    But "Welcome down," "Welcome down here," "Welcome over here this morning," "Welcome in, welcome in," etc., etc., are easy to find in GoogleBooks back to the 19th century, so this breed of the Welcome doesn't seem to be very new.

  15. Victor Mair said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 11:42 am

    A famous grammarian confided to me that Julian is right: the in is an intransitive preposition (one with no following NP), so the syntax is just like Welcome to my home. An idiomatic uninflected verb followed by a PP.

    Be that as it may, the fact that employees of a truck stop / gas station in the middle of the southwest Wyoming desert are all of a sudden calling it out to all the customers who come in is noteworthy, to say the least. Even if they called out "Welcome" to everybody who came in, that would beg for an explanation. I've never experienced that before in any truck stop or gas station. All the more, why are they saying "Welcome in" out there in the desert?

  16. RfP said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 1:05 pm

    Thanks for the clarification, @Julian and @FamousGrammarian!

    I believed a dictionary instead of reaching for a grammar!

    It looks like section 6 of Chapter 4 (page 272 of the printed edition of the CGEL) is the go-to for issues like this.

    The people who wrote this book seem to know a thing or two about this whole … grammar … thing.

  17. Dennis Paul Himes said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 1:55 pm

    As Gregory Kusnick pointed out, Wamsutta was the son and heir of Massasoit, king of the Wampanoag. His death soon after a meeting with Massachusettsmen, which was suspected to be caused by poisoning, was a contributing cause to the onset of King Philip's War. (King Philip being Wamsutta's brother and heir Metacomet.)

  18. JPL said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 4:25 pm

    I'm not a grammarian, but is "welcome" as a greeting functioning as an uninflected verb, as would be the case in, "Go and welcome the guests to our house."? "Go and tell the guests they have come well to our house." "to" is there because of the directionality of the movement of the guests. So how do we get "in"? Is it short for, "As you've come in, welcome!"? And why do we never hear, "Welcome to"?

  19. JPL said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 5:06 pm

    I think the "in" in the greeting "welcome in" is there to indicate that the greeting is directed at "you who have just come in", as opposed to those who are already there. (It's usually called out by someone well inside the store, audible to everybody, but not clearly face to face with the new guest. At the door, a simple "welcome" would be natural.)

  20. JPL said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 5:20 pm

    (The above comment was meant as a hypothesis about the origin of the expression, not as a statement of a rule for usage.)

  21. Jonathan Smith said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 6:09 pm

    IMO it seems more likely that diachronically such phrases came from e.g. "You are welcome here" i.e. involve(d) welcome (adj.) as opposed to welcome (v.) but I also DK.

  22. John Swindle said,

    September 10, 2024 @ 7:42 pm

    When I say "Wahiawā" is "otherwise" pronounced as a four-syllable word with primary or secondary stress on the first syllable, Iʻm referring to its usual, local English pronunciation, not to tourist approximations or to its pronunciation in Hawaiian.

  23. Philip Anderson said,

    September 11, 2024 @ 1:08 am

    @JPL
    Welcome didn’t actually come from well+come, and it was an exclamation before it was a verb. See Wiktionary.
    In, like aboard, is an adverb here, which is why it works but ‘to’ doesn’t.

  24. JPL said,

    September 11, 2024 @ 1:36 am

    I didn't say that 'welcome' came from "'well+come'"; I would have thought that the verbal 'welcome' might have come from the 'welcome' as a greeting. However, I did mean to suggest that it might have to do with the direction of movement of a guest from outside to inside a space, to which they were being welcomed. So, "come aboard" and "welcome aboard"; others seem at least possible: "come outside/welcome outside", "come over/ welcome over", "come along/welcome along". So not a preposition.

  25. loon said,

    September 11, 2024 @ 1:49 am

    'Welcome in' as a shorter, and/or composed-of-known-words, formulation of 'Well. come in" or 'It is my will for you to come in' sounds more like a hearkening-back to [older meanings / the etymology of] 'Welcome' than a borrowing from Japanese usage. Though i see no reason not to have a parallel in most languages. The romance languages go 'bienvenue / benvenuto / bienvenido' (-though i do not know how one would have greeted a guest to the house in vulgar latin – is that the true ancestor here?). The Polish 'witamy ..' though seems to stem more from an affirmation that the guest is to live there? Lithuanian 'sveiki atvykę' seems to be basically 'you're good to come here' as in 'it is fine for you to come here'.

    Basically all going back to 'i will not kill you if you make a move' coupled with a specific direction/location for that move.

  26. VVOV said,

    September 11, 2024 @ 7:48 am

    Reporting from the Chicago area: "Welcome in!" has definitely become common in the past 4-5ish years. Like others in this comment thread, I found it to sound odd and almost ungrammatical the first time I heard it, but I am now used to it. I never made the connection to "irasshaimase" despite having lived in Japan in the past.

    Lillie Dremeaux's observation that it's heard more in "upscale" or "high-end" shops is interesting. It certainly isn't exclusive to those places, but I do associate it with places that are at least trying to generate a slightly fancier vibe. I think that I hear it more frequently in restaurants than other types of establishments, and don't think I've heard it at a gas station before.

  27. VVOV said,

    September 11, 2024 @ 7:52 am

    To add: I found this article discussing the recent history of "Welcome in!" https://www.eater.com/24022477/why-is-everyone-saying-welcome-in

    They cite a 2012 training manual from an expensive restaurant in Texas in 2012 that instructed employees to say "Welcome in!", and speculate that the usage may have originated from the South and Southwest hospitality industry.

  28. Andrew Usher said,

    September 11, 2024 @ 8:09 am

    It sounds like, and probably is, a confusion of 'welcome' with 'come in'. My mind could not consider it grammatical.

    It is not a calque; other languages do use the preposition 'in' with their 'welcome', but not, so far I know, without an object, no more than we'd say "Welcome to!"

    k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com

  29. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    September 11, 2024 @ 8:51 am

    Does this have a name yet? If not, may I suggest: "salutative illative"?

  30. JPL said,

    September 11, 2024 @ 9:17 pm

    Looking at the comments from Julian and "a famous grammarian" (in VM's comment), I see that "welcome" in the expression "welcome in" seems there to be considered as verbal in syntactic function. But "welcome" as a greeting is not descriptive or referential, but only expressive of an attitude of social acceptance by the speaker, as opposed to the imperative "come in", which refers to a future act of the addressee (which, however, may or may not be "satisfied"). If we change the intransitive "come" to the transitive "bring", we get "bring it in", as compared to "bring it into the house". Another example of an intransitive verb like "come in" would be "sit in", as in, "Your class is full" "You can sit in." Looks like what they call a "verb-particle" construction, where I guess the particle is said to have adverbial function ("shake it off", "work it over", "stand in", "carry on"). The "particle" differentiates "come in" from just "come". "Come in our house", "Welcome in our house" or, "welcome them in our house" are not good. So where does the "in" in "welcome in" come from?

  31. JPL said,

    September 12, 2024 @ 1:26 am

    Sorry to go on like this, but I notice also, with puzzlement, that it looks like in these comments the class of "prepositions" (a term invoking the formal distinction between affixes and adpositions, among others) is considered as subcategorized in terms of the "transitive/intransitive" distinction, so that the "in" in "welcome in" is considered an "intransitive preposition". I know we're dealing with a fairly large category (probably closed, but probably not strongly structured internally) of lexemes that express basically static and dynamic spatial relations, some with more abstract "grammatical"-type senses (e.g., 'to' in "infinitive constructions), and others with more concrete senses, and that the category includes a few different possible syntactic functions; but I thought, perhaps mistakenly, that the notion of transitivity applied only to verbal complementation in core clause structure, and that members of this fairly large category of lexemes (i.e., that indicate, with varying degrees of abstractness, types of spatial relations) participated in a distinction between marked and unmarked verbal complementation. ("Direct objects" being unmarked and, prepositional phrases in core clause structure being marked for distinct senses), so that in, e.g., "He resorted to bufoonery", the entire PP is a verbal complement. I thought the term (syntactic) 'object' applied to mainly unmarked verbal complements, and that "object of a preposition" was a different kind of relation than verbal complementation, since in some languages the kinds of meanings expressed in English by prepositions are expressed via affixation. So, is there a general principle distinguishing the members of this large category in terms of those that can appear in what I think are called "verb-particle" constructions (or, "without an object") and those which can't, or distinguishing between the "verb-particle construction" and the post-verbal prepositional phrase in terms of what is expressed? I'd never heard of "intransitive prepositions", but what do I know? If anybody wants to set me straight, please, go ahead. But it seems like the distinction between "come in" and plain "come" is not one of complementation, but involves some distinction in sense of the verbal element, and the idea of a "preposition" without an "object" it's preposed to (a complement?) is kind of weird. So, since we're not talking about "welcome to the store", that's why I suggested that the "in" in "welcome in" might have developed from a situation where a storeperson needs to address from a distance a guest who "has just come in".

  32. John Swindle said,

    September 12, 2024 @ 3:06 am

    @JPL: Like "Welcome back."

  33. JPL said,

    September 12, 2024 @ 6:06 am

    @John Swindle:

    Nice! "Come back", "Welcome back". It should be a productive syntactic mechanism.

  34. JPL said,

    September 12, 2024 @ 5:33 pm

    Just to summarize, after my ruminations above, my original question ("What is the grammatical function of "in" here?") is (for me at least) still open. But tentatively I would suggest that the "in" in the greeting "welcome in" is neither an adverbial nor a preposition, but, if it's appropriate to talk of "grammatical function" at all (the greeting "welcome in" is not a sentence, clause or phrase; yes, I said "not a phrase": discuss), seems more similar to the "there" in the greeting "Hello there". The "in" comes from "somewhere else", and the sense expressed is "left over" from a possible logically previous unexpressed thought. ("Thought", of course, in the objective non-psychological sense.)

  35. Andrew Usher said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 7:16 am

    I assume your extended comments are really trying to get at the category of phrasal verbs, which is where 'intransitive prepositions' usually appear – many would say that they are no longer prepositions when used there.

    Can 'welcome in' be a phrasal verb? It seems to be usual to say that 'welcome' is not a verb there, but I don't see that necessarily to be true: it could come from "I/we welcome you" as much as from "You're welcome", and the verb (in English and other languages) comes from re-interpretation anyway.

    The parallel to 'welcome back' doesn't quite work, as 'back' can be an independent adjective with that meaning; while 'in' doesn't have the right semantics – that is, one could say Welcome back and You're back at the same time, but _not_ Welcome in and You're in. In all those the 'adjective' would be predicative.

    I can't give a definitive answer either; I can only say that 'welcome in' seems wrong to me, as to many, and surely it's ill-advised to order employees to use such a phrase.

  36. Sharon Goetz said,

    September 13, 2024 @ 11:13 pm

    In the Bay Area, "Welcome in" is used commonly by millennials and gen Z. Millennials have become (along with folks my age, slightly older) quite solidly the managerial class at shops and restaurants. They now set the terms of what's usual for the customer experience or for customer success; people flinch away from "customer service" lately, too. In forme of speche is chaunge, yes?

  37. JPL said,

    September 15, 2024 @ 2:02 am

    @Andrew Usher:
    "I assume your extended comments are really trying to get at the category of phrasal verbs, which is where 'intransitive prepositions' usually appear – many would say that they are no longer prepositions when used there."

    Yes, this seems to be the larger issue behind the question of the grammatical function and origin of the "in" in the greeting "welcome in".

    Before I get to that, I forgot to include a couple of examples in the above comments.
    1. Go and welcome the guests. Go and welcome them in.
    2. I (hereby) welcome you in.
    In these sentences "welcome" is functioning as a verb, unlike in the greeting. The difference between "welcome in" and "come in" is that "welcome" is transitive, and seems incomplete without expression of the direct object, as it is expressed in 1 and 2. 2 is an example of reflexive reference, where the speaker is referring to the act of uttering the sentence she is currently uttering. But the greeting performs the same social function without the self-reference, just by expressing the sentiment. "Welcome in" also seems strange, perhaps, because it seems incomplete in another way, since without the direct object expressed, "in" alone seems like a preposition without its "object"; but "in" is possible as a "particle" in a sentence with the direct object expressed, and there it has a recognizable grammatical role. And the role of "in" in "welcome in" seems equivalent to whatever the role is that "in" plays in the sentence with the direct object expressed. So the question is, what is that role? (The non-committal term "particle" gives us no indication; "adverbial" doesn't seem much more helpful.) And is it like the role of "prepositional phrases" in clause structure?

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