Your compiler is uncertain about the spelling of the first title word and is open to suggestions.  For those who do not recognize it, the term is the common Southern vernacular pronunciation for the word “children.”

      Your compiler supposes it might be the way some Southerners actually pronounce the word, although in his own experience, it was always a term of affection or perhaps one for a mild parental warning shot, so to speak.   His own mother, a precise-speaking English major and high school English teacher before motherhood, used to say it when addressing her three children in masse in a variety of circumstances.   

     “Chillun,” she might have said in a light and fun moment, “how’d y’all like to make a churn of ice cream?”   One can bet this suggestion was always met with excited acquiescence, for a churn of homemade ice cream is good enough to heal the sick and near-about raise the dead.

      In an ordinary, hum-drum comment, she might have said, “Chillun, jump into the station wagon.  It’s time to go to your piano lessons.”   Your compiler took twelve years’ worth of lessons and was once proficient enough to have played Mozart’s Piano Concerto  No. 21 in C-major in Atlanta’s Symphony Hall, but has not kept it up and is now nothing more than a decent church hymn-player.  To any young persons currently striving for mastery of that rigorous discipline, he would say, “Chillun, you can’t let up on the practicing or you’ll lose your skill, as I did.”  (Your compiler is bad to digress, as you may have noticed.)

     And on occasions, which were numerous, when the behavior of her herd of offspring was taxing her patience, your compiler’s mother might have said, “Chillun, if y’all don’t straighten up and fly right, I’ll sell you to the gypsies.”   This maternal shot across the bow was usually enough at least to take the edge off the offending behavior.  

     The term does not work in poetry; Longfellow would likely rotate rapidly in his grave if we were to begin his poem, “Listen, my chillun, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere…”  But there is a lovely old African American spiritual entitled, “All God’s Chillun Got Wings,” which enshrines the affectionate old term beautifully.

       A similar term is “young’uns,” which can be used more or less interchangeably with “chillun”  Young’uns, of course, is the Southern contraction of “young ones,” which is way to much to have to enunciate conversationally.   But “young’uns” trips over the tongue beautifully, and like “chillun,” has a doting, familiar, and endearing tone to it when used as a direct address, or in a story-telling or familial context.  

     Chillun and young’uns – may they always bless our lives!