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I'm from Nashville, TN and live in Seattle, WA and recall one particular instance on a date here when some girl was trying to get snippy & sassy about the "pen" vs "pin" issue. She and many other people here, and generally outside of the southern states, immediately equate the accent with ignorance. Which makes everyone adopting "y'all" more casually now really funny and weird to see, like are you mocking it or celebrating it?

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I think "y'all" is becoming more common at least in part out of an interest to avoid "you guys," which people perceive to be overly gendered. I notice (in my own speech and others') "folks" replacing "guys" in other contexts, for the same reason. The fact that both make everyone sound a little more casual, and a little more southern, is probably mostly a side effect -- general American English just doesn't have obvious gender-neutral words to fill those semantic functions.

IDK if this is everyone, but I, as a native English speaker raised in Canada, use it because English doesn't have a better 2nd person plural pronoun (think German "ihr").

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