Yo

""Yo" is an American English slang interjection. It was highly popularized after being commonly used among Italian Americans and African Americans in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.cite book
last=Dalzell
first=Tom
title=Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang
year=1996
publisher=Merriam Webster
location=Springfield, Massachusetts
isbn=0-87779-612-2]

Usage

Although often used as a greeting, like the word hey, it may have a wide range of other, subtler meanings that depend on the tone, context, and situation. Two prominent examples include:

*"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, "It is a really hot day, 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.

There are also reports of students in Baltimore consistently using "yo" as a gender-neutral pronoun. [cite web
year=2008
url=http://www.bignewsday.com/story.asp?code=BZ345203T&news=yo_being_used_as_gender-neutral_pronoun
title='Yo' Being Used As 'Gender-Neutral Pronoun'
work=Big News Day
publisher=Global News likes
language=English
accessdate=2008-01-07
accessyear=]

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.

References