Question 1

What does “yo” mean?

Accepted Answer

A third-person pronoun with no gender in it — he or she, either one. Black Baltimore kids built it themselves in the early 2000s.

Question 2

Where does “yo” come from?

Accepted Answer

Black adolescent speech in Baltimore, observed from 2004. Two Johns Hopkins researchers, Elaine Stotko and Margaret Troyer, heard about it from Baltimore middle and high school teachers in a graduate linguistics class, then collected spontaneous tokens and ran writing and judgment tasks with more than two hundred students at two unrelated Baltimore schools. Ten of fifty-one students writing free conversation produced the pronoun without prompting. They published in American Speech in the fall of 2007. They also did the work of ruling things out: they searched thousands of rap lyrics and found 35,100 instances of yo and not one of them a third-person pronoun, which kills the assumption that this came out of records. They contacted teachers in Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Dayton, New York, San Jose and Long Beach and found no pronominal use anywhere else. This is a Baltimore innovation, made by children, with no institution behind it. One honest limit that belongs on the entry: it is one preliminary study and it has never been replicated. The authors' own recheck found only about five of twenty Baltimore teachers still hearing it by 2007, with the gender-neutral function already narrowing toward male referents.