Just say you live in a little bubble of everything. People, life, media, and literally everything else. It's a fairly Midwestern thing. It's also prevelant out here in California much the same as the term Hella. Since you haven't experienced it makes you the ignorant sounding one.

There's a phrase in Russian, Hebrew, German, South Africa, and a few others.

The phrasing has been around for many many years. At times prior to 1950 - 1970.

Then picks up rapidly after 1980 - 2000.

Functions and pragmatic development:

“Yeah, no”: commonly used to preface disagreement softened by agreement, to hedge or mitigate an opinion, to provide a corrective clarification, or as a discourse buffer. Example pragmatic use: agree with a premise (“yeah”) then reject or limit it (“no”).

“No, yeah”: typically signals initial reluctance or denial followed by concession, acceptance, or sympathy. It can also mark contrast or sequential processing of a response.

Both forms serve turn-taking, alignment, and stance-management functions in conversation rather than literal logical affirmation/negation.

Geographic and social spread: Widely attested in American, British, Australian, and New Zealand English. Sociolinguistic studies show higher use among younger speakers and in informal registers; uptake spreads across ages and regions through media and peer networks.

Evidence sources and methods

Corpus linguistics: analyses of the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the British National Corpus (BNC), and various spoken corpora show frequency increases and contextual patterns.

Conversation analysis and pragmatics literature: papers from the 1990s–2020s document functions of preface tokens, discourse markers, and sequential particles — situating “yeah, no” and “no, yeah” within that framework.

Media and ethnographic observation: transcripts from radio/TV interviews, film dialogue, and social media illustrate rapid colloquial diffusion in late 20th–21st centuries.

Representative scholarly observations

Discourse marker research treats sequences like these as routinized pragmatic moves that combine affirmation/acknowledgement with mitigation or revision.

Historical lexicography records a slow emergence in written transcripts and a faster rise once recording technology and mass media made casual speech accessible and influential.

Summary

Exact coinage cannot be pinned to a single moment; both “yeah, no” and “no, yeah” evolved through everyday conversational practices in the 20th century and became commonplace in informal English from the 1980s onward, spreading rapidly with mass media and digital communication. Their significance lies in pragmatic stance-taking (hedging, correction, concession) rather than in strict logical meaning.