Yo

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For other uses, see Yo (disambiguation).

For other uses, see your.

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"Yo" is an American English slang interjection. It was highly popularized after being commonly used among Italian Americans and African Americans in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.^[1]

[edit] Usage

Although often used as a greeting, like the word "hey", it has a wide range of other meanings that depend on the tone, context, and situation.

"Yo" is often usedin the Southern United States as a substitute for the response "Here" to acknowledge one's presence during a roll call.^[2]

"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, "That girl is really hot, yo", or to strengthen meaning to a particular point, "This hot dog is good, yo!". The Japanese language sentence-final particle "yo" has approximately the same meaning, but is etymologically unrelated.

"Yo" is being used as a gender neutral pronoun among children in Baltimore^[3] ^[4]. This has also been studied at Johns Hopkins University^[5].

According to the non-fiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, "Yo" was a derogatory term for a young black man used by the Baltimore Homicide Department. A young black woman was referred to as a Yo-ette.

[edit] Unrelated terms

In addition to the unrelated Japanese language sentence-final particle "yo", there are several other unrelated homophones or homographs of yo which have different meanings and etymologies.

In the Spanish language, the word for the first person personal pronoun I is "yo", but this is completely unrelated to the modern colloquial English morpheme yo. The Spanish pronoun "yo", the English pronoun "I" and others such as French "je", German "ich" and Latin "ego" all derive from a Proto 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.