1101. Do you know when to change a "y" to an "ies" for a plural, and when to just add an "s"? Today, we look at the rules. Then, we look at linguist Bill Labov's famous department store study, which shows how social class relates to speech patterns.
1101. Do you know when to change a "y" to an "ies" for a plural, and when to just add an "s"? Today, we look at the rules. Then, we look at linguist Bill Labov's famous department store study, which shows how social class relates to speech patterns.
The 'y' segment was written by Samantha Enslen, who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com.
The segment about Bill Labov was written by Valerie Friedland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we're going to talk about the different ways we make words that end in Y plural, and then we'll talk about some of Bill Labov's famous linguistics studies.
by Samantha Enslen
A member of our Facebook Grammar Girl group asked if we know why the plurals of some words that end with the letter "y" take an “-s,” whereas others take an “-ies.”
Rich, we have an answer for you.
Fortunately, in English, plurals do have some consistent rules.
Most plurals are formed by adding ‘-s’ or ‘-es’
For example, most plurals are formed by simply adding “-s” or “-es” to the end of a word. If a noun ends with a sound that merges gracefully with the “s” sound, you add an “-s.” For example, “dog” becomes “dogs,” and “cat” becomes “cats.”
Wondering about plurals like “children” and “oxen”? Look here!
If a noun ends with a sound that doesn’t slide smoothly into an “s” sound, you add “-es.” This happens a lot with words that end in sibilant sounds like “-sh,” “-ch,” “-x,” “-z,” and “-s.” For example, “church” becomes “churches.” “Buzz” becomes “buzzes.” And “box” becomes “boxes.” (All with an “-es” on the end.)
A similar pattern happens with words that end in “-y.”
Common nouns that end in ‘-y’ take an ‘-s’; those that end in ‘vowel + y’ take an ‘-ies’
If the “y” comes right after a consonant or the letters “qu,” we change the “y” to “ies.” For example, “lady” becomes “ladies.” L-A-D-I-E-S “Baby” becomes “babies.” B-A-B-I-E-S “Soliloquy” becomes “soliloquies.” With an -I-E-S at the end.
In contrast, if the “y” comes right after a vowel, we just add an “s” to the word to make it plural. So “journey” becomes “journeys.” J-O-U-R-N-E-Y-S “Play” becomes “plays.” P-L-A-Y-S And “cowboy” becomes “cowboys.” with just an S at the end.
An easy way to remember this is to think of that vowel before the “-y.” If you were to change the “-y” to “-ies,” you’d be piling two more vowels at the end of the word. Think how “plays” would look if it were spelled “P-L-A-I-E-S.” That’s a lot of vowels smashed together!
Proper nouns that end in ‘-y’ take an ‘-s’
Here's one other tip: For proper nouns that end in “-y,” you simply add an “-s.” You never convert the “-y” to “-ies” no matter what letter comes before the “y.” For example, if you had two Cadbury Creme Eggs, you’d have two “Cadburys” spelled with B-U-R-Y-S at the end even though there’s a consonant before the “y.” If you were writing about the “Murray” family, you’d spell it “Murrays.” M-U-R-R-A-Y-S
Read more about how to make other types of family names plural.
All this said, there are exceptions to these rules. If you’re ever in doubt about a specific word, check a dictionary or a usage guide to be sure.
So, that’s your tidbit for today. Common nouns that end in a consonant plus “y” usually take an “-ies” when they become plural. Common nouns that end in a vowel plus “y” usually take just an “s.” And when you’re turning a proper noun into a plural, no matter what, just an “s.”
That segment was written by Samantha Enslen, who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com.
This next segment is by Valerie Friedland. It's about a famous linguist named Bill Labov. Valerie knew Bill, and I asked her to write this after I saw an outpouring of love and praise for him on social media among linguists after he died back in December.
by Valerie Fridland
When a linguist asks where to find a particular clothing item in a multilevel department store, be suspicious: they're probably just trying to get someone in the store to say “on the fourth floor” rather than looking to update their wardrobe. This slightly sneaky but also fun way of doing linguistic fieldwork was a method pioneered by the late linguist William Labov, the father of modern sociolinguistics and a man whose impact on the field of linguistics was profound.
As a young man growing up in New Jersey within shouting distance of the traditional New York accent, Labov developed a keen interest in dialect differences, but he started his career as an ink maker after having studied chemistry as well as philosophy and English in college. Soon though, intellectual curiosity got the best of him, and he decided to pursue a PhD in linguistics at Columbia University.
Labov’s particular interest in studying the everyday variations heard in speech was quite unusual at that time in the world of linguistics. The study of language in the 1950s was more about describing the inner mental workings that allowed humans to create sentences like “That stray dog chased Tom’s cat” while preventing them from saying things like “Cat dog Tom’s chased stray that” rather than trying to understand how and why some people dropped their R's, but only in certain times and places.
The problem Labov understood, though, was that the rigid and fixed system of language that the scholars of the time were working to describe was an idealized one that failed to adequately account for what speakers – especially those who didn’t sound like they spent all their time on a college campus – what those speakers actually sounded like. Nor could it adequately explain why or how language seemed to always shift over time or how people were still almost always able to make sense of one another, even as language changed (literally) right under their noses.
Labov instead believed language is, at its core, socially constructed. He was interested in understanding how social triggers — like what happens when people move, have more or less money, are involved in geopolitical conflicts, or are just living through shifting social norms around what’s cool and what’s not — how these triggers interacted with small underlying linguistic biases to develop into the differences we notice among groups of speakers over time.
Of course, one big problem was figuring out exactly how to measure the influence that social divisions like those associated with class, race, place, and gender had on the seemingly random and chaotic variants people heard around them at any one time, things like saying “walkin’ vs. “walking” or saying “plenny” for “plenty.”
Labov’s scientific training as a chemist had taught him the importance of doing experiments to test his theories, and he felt it was vitally important to actually listen to people talking out in the world to learn about the social and linguistic features relevant in a particular local community. In other words, Labov knew there was a method to the linguistic madness, if one just knew how and where to look.
Luckily, Labov’s talent included being a gifted conversationalist. He was particularly attuned to asking the types of questions that quickly put people at ease and got them focused more on the answer rather than on self-consciously monitoring the way they were speaking. One famous question he asked many of his interviewees became known as the “Danger of Death” question: namely “Have you ever bee r of getting killed, or where you thought to yourself, this is it?” Another question he frequently asked was “If there was one thing that happened to you in your life that you will never forget, what would it be?”
After asking such questions to get uninhibited spontaneous speech, Dr. Labov used quantitative analysis techniques to tease out how speakers’ identities — like being male or female, Black or white, or white collar or blue collar — led to surprisingly regular patterns of linguistic variation, such as predicting when and why people used “walkin” instead of “walking.”
In what is probably his most famous study, Labov established a new technique that would become known as the Rapid and Anonymous Survey method all while searching for the perfect pair of ladies’ shoes across several New York Department stores. Crucially, these were not random stores, but stores that were separated by the type of people who shopped there. Saks catered to upper-class shoppers, while Macy’s was a more middle-class store. The now defunct store, Klein’s, was a lower-end shopping destination. By asking all the salesclerks in each store where a certain item was that Labov already knew was on the fourth floor (often turning out to be ladies shoes), he was able to get them to say the phrase “fourth floor” with its double R sounds because he wanted to find out whether social class determined who used local New York accent features such as dropping the ‘r’ in words like, well, “New Yawk,” “cah” for “car,” or “pahk” for “park.”
His study revealed that there was a very systematic relationship between the rate of R dropping and the type of store he was in. Though all the clerks were from roughly the same class background regardless of their employer, the salespeople at the higher end store were more likely to say the R's (saying the full “fourth floor”) compared to the salespeople at the middle-class store. Still, Macy’s clerks said their R's more than the clerks at the discount store (where “fowth flo” was more common).
What Labov’s research uncovered was that, because of such regular usage patterns, variation in a community often starts to take on particular social meaning (like being posh by using R or being down to earth and authentically local by dropping it) and this is what drives language to vary and even potentially change over time, as more and more speakers adopt features that have taken on socially useful or attractive social meaning. Crucially, since speakers don’t get the same social rewards from using prestigious speech forms (meaning those taught as “standard” or “correct”), variation is often in the direction of local or solidarity building forms that connect them to the people and places they value. In other words, nobody likes to be friends with someone who sounds stuck up, so if everyone in your neighborhood, school, or department store uses non-standard language, you probably will too.
Labov went on to have a long and illustrious career as a professor at University of Pennsylvania and continued to make important research contributions until he passed away at the age of 97 in 2024. In addition to his innovative research on language variation and change, his work uncovering the systematic rules and patterns that underpin dialects ranging from the local New York and Philly accents to that of African American Vernacular English has had a profound impact on the destigmatization of non-standard varieties and on educational practices in the United States. His advocacy supporting the legitimacy of such varieties included testifying in a landmark case against linguistic discrimination in school curriculums in Michigan and designing linguistically informed reading materials to help non-standard speaking children connect the sounds of their dialect with written letters to improve reading success and fluency..
What this impressive scholar’s body of work over the years has revealed time and time again is that people can get social power from sounding different — a power that does not always align with dominant economic, professional, regional, and ethnic groups — and that understanding this social dimension is critical to understanding what makes variation and change a fundamental part of the language system itself.
The segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
Finally, I have a familect story.
Hi, Mignon. I have a familect for you from Guatemala. And the local word for dog is "chucho." I started calling my daughter that, but my mom thought it was too harsh. So she turned it into "chuchu." And now that's a word we use for someone we love. So like "sweetie" or "honey" and stuff like that, we would say "chuchu." Thank you.
Thank you! That is adorable.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a word or phrase that you only use with your friends or family, leave a message on the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp. Be sure to call from a nice, quiet place, and if you want that number or link later, you can always find them in the show notes.
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And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip-a-day book "The Grammar Daily." That's all. Thanks for listening.