How many people here say:

I would've went.

and how many say:

I would've gone.


All of us here who are native speakers of English don't think about the grammar (or maybe we do, it's just that our subconscious does it for us...), but if we look at the... "rules"...

Verb: take
Past: took
Adjective: taken

From this we know that we should say:

I would have taken
I should have taken
I could have taken

So if we use this for "go", we get:

Verb: go
Past: went
Adjective: gone

This means that we should say:

I would have gone
I should have gone
I could have gone

but...

I always always always say:

I would've went, for instance:

Jesus, you shoulda told me you were goin', I woulda went with you!


If anything, it's "I would've gone with you" that sounds wrong to me...


Just some food for thought about how we never think of grammar with our native tongue, but how we're obsessed with it when learning a new language!

I would've come / I would've came ?

These are evolutions, simplifications and regularizations that native speakers do when speaking their language. It doesn't mean that they don't know the standard forms. That's a normal phenomenon, that's how languages change with time.

I should say "traditional speakers", better than "native speaker", because as we've already pointed out, you can be considered a native speaker if u've been brought up in a language by someone who isn't a native himself. Let's use traditional speaker for people who've been brought up by people who are native speakers who've been brought up by people who are native etc for generations, without breaking the "chain" of speakers since Gaels came to Ireland.

I think many of the variations of this type are regional. For example, in relation to your gone/went topic, I speak the dialect of English most typically spoken by whites in the Washington, DC area, and I would always choose "I would have gone" as that is what sounds natural to my mind. "I would have went" would of course also be acceptable (although a bit "funny"), and wouldn't particularly stand out to my ear, but I don't think many people in this area would choose that construction.

It might be different only fifty miles south of here in Richmond, Virginia, on the other hand, where "would have went" might be the norm. For that matter, among Blacks right here in DC, "would have went" might be usual. In my opinion, neither one nor the other is transcendentally "correct" or "incorrect," as each dialect is equally valid as an "heir" to our common proto-common-English ancestor language :).

Some of the grammatical usages and vocabulary choices in American English (as well as Hiberno-English, in fact) tend to be archaisms compared to, say, Received Pronunciation or other British English dialects.