For most native English speakers the word 'yonder' is either archaic or poetic. For many native speakers in the Southern United States however, it is still a word in common but declining use. Those who still use the term rhyme it with 'wonder' rather than 'wander.'
Having used the term all my life I notice that there is a distinction between the meaning of the phrases 'over there' and 'over yonder' which I have never seen mentioned in a dictionary.
One may say "The ball is over there where you are" but not "The ball is over yonder where you are." However, one can say either "The ball is over there in the bushes" or "The ball is over yonder in the bushes."
The distinction appears to be that 'yonder' is somewhere distant from both the speaker and the 'spoken to' whereas 'there' just means somewhere distant from the speaker.
Can anyone who also uses the term 'yonder' in everyday speech or someone familiar with English dialects verify this distinction.
Best Answer
I think it would be a mistake to assume that yonder generally represents a greater distance from the speaker than there does. Either term, unadorned, is ambiguous as to distance. The key to conveying a sense of how distant a thing "there" or "yonder" actually is lies in the modifier or modifiers attached to it, although some resulting phrases (such as "over there" and "over yonder") remain exceedingly vague as to distance. Consider, for example, the popular World War I song "Over There" by George M. Cohan, where there referred to "in Europe"—that is, across the Atlantic Ocean.
Because many people today do not use yonder as a standard part of their vocabulary, they may associate it with a particular usage that implies considerable distance, as in the song "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans." But for people who use yonder regularly, I suspect, the range of distances that the term can comfortably comprehend is quite broad. My grandfather, who was born in western Kentucky in 1903, used yonder occasionally and variably, often to indicate an indefinite place—for example, "the cows are grazing out yonder," meaning that the cows are grazing in a nearby pasture but it isn't entirely clear which pasture or which part of a single pasture they are in.
You can get a sense of the range of use of yonder in everyday speech in regions where the word was common by looking at recorded examples of its use (in the sense of "there; at or in that place") in Harold Wentworth, American Dialect Dictionary (1944):
Wentworth selected these examples mainly to show variants in pronunciation, prepositional use, and regional distribution of yonder; but the examples also convey a sense of how broadly applicable yonder was to different situations for speakers who used the term frequently. For some of them, at least, yonder seems coextensive with there as a term for position or distance. Such speakers might at times use yonder in connection with distant locations, but they might also use it in reference to the corner of a room they were sitting in, for example, or a bed elsewhere in the same house.
The decisive factor in defining how distant yonder is for a particular speaker, in other words, is whether the speaker uses the word frequently and widely in situations where other speakers might use there, or whether the speaker uses it relatively rarely and in particular contexts—for example, as part of a longer set phrase such as "way over yonder."