Yesterday, I visited an orchard in Caledon (Ontario) in search of fresh hazelnuts.  While I was waiting anxiously to start the harvesting process, I heard someone say: “Alls (or All’s) I know is they don’t have anymore.”

Perfect, I thought.  We travelled an hour only to discover that the hazelnuts were sold out.

The news was disheartening, but I suppose the silver lining to this story is that I didn’t leave the orchard entirely empty-handed.

On the car ride home, I kept thinking to myself: Why did the person attach an ‘s’ or an ‘apostrophe s’ to the word “all”?

All (without an “s” or an apostrophe “s”) can be a noun, a determiner, an adverb or a pronoun.  But how would I classify the word “alls or all’s”?

Is this a dialect? Is it an idiomatic expression? A contraction? Blatant abuse of the English language?   If someone had asked me about the word “alls” yesterday, I would have been at a total loss for words.  As if the distress of not harvesting a single hazelnut weren’t bad enough, I had managed to plunge myself knee-deep into an even greater language-related distress.

Perhaps the word “distress” is too strong.

Let’s call it an annoying fascination.

Three big questions, in particular, piqued my curiosity: (1) what is the origin of the alls-construction? (2) what does it actually mean? And, most importantly, (3) should we use it?

What follows is a very simplified (and somewhat incomplete) answer to my questions.

ORIGIN

Linguists have yet to pinpoint the exact origin of the “alls-construction”. According to an article entitled “All there is to know about the alls-construction” (2011), written by Professors Michael Putnam and Marjo Van Koppen, the origin could come from Early Modern English, but the authors say that it is unclear.   Putnam and Van Koppen explain that the word is part of the dialects used in American states such as Kentucky, Ohio, Minnesota, as well as in the deep south.  I did not find any information about when it started to be used in Canada.

MEANING

The meaning of the term “alls or all’s” is also somewhat unclear.  There’s an interesting web page that outlines many possible meanings. Click here to be directed to the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project:  https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/alls-construction.  It seems to me that “Alls” or “All’s” can mean:

• A contraction meaning all as, where “as” functioning as the relative pronoun “that“
• Not a replacement for “All”, but rather a replacement for a “wh-word” in the subject position
• A shortening of the American Regional English word, “Alst” (All that I know)

USAGE

Is it appropriate to use the ‘alls-construction” in everyday conversation?

This is a complicated question. And, I’m afraid that I haven’t found a definitive answer yet.  From my perspective, however, if a person’s intention is to speak a colloquial dialect in casual, everyday conversation, then I do not believe that “alls” should be banned in informal and natural conversation.  What’s more, I believe that it would be unfair and untrue to say that people who use the word “alls” are somehow less educated than those who choose not to use it.  Nowadays, many professionals (including many Canadian politicians and prominent Canadian talk show hosts) use the expressions: “Alls I’m saying” or “Alls I want to do is …” . Does this mean that they are uneducated?  Not necessarily.

However, in certain Canadian academic circles or in workplace settings where formal English is spoken and written, I would avoid the “alls-construction”.

Here’s my thinking:  As far as I know, the word ‘all’ does not have a plural form, grammatically speaking.

In fact, the word “all” – when used as a determiner – can be plural sometimes.   It means “the whole” or “every one” and it does not need an s-ending.  For example, I would write: “All children”, not “Alls children” – even though the reference is to a plural noun.

More research and exploration is needed on this topic from a Canadian context.

But, I certainly thank you for taking the time to read some of my preliminary thoughts.