The singular use of “they” is entirely consistent with other linguistic shifts, and even familiar to older periods of English. The term’s partisanship may come more from how quickly and forcefully the change, rather than the change itself.
That’s from linguist John McWhorter’s new book Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words.
I’m a fan, and have read most of his other books. This one is consistent with his growing style: Using credible linguistics research to guide us through today’s language changes. It’s a quick and approachable read, I recommend it.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- Author’s young daughter would ask him to “Cah-you” (and so does mine!)
- “No speaker experiences any major jump in the language in their brief lifetimes, but the creeping never stops such that what comes out can be staggeringly unlike what went in, just as what was once a tiny shrew ask little bugger skittering in the bushes avoiding dinosaurs is now a giraffe, a capybara and Vince Vaughn”
- Proto Indo European became so many languages
- Billy and I go to the store” but “it’s me” because the pronouncing subject and object isn’t as perfect a rule as we were taught (but in Latin and Greek the subject object provide for pronouns Is definitive)!
- Billy and me vs I is as random as whether ankle socks or tube socks are in
- There was never a Ye as in Ye Olde Shoppe, there was Ye in a plural object (preserved in Hear Ye Hear Ye, which would be translated as Listen Y’All)
- Languages don’t always simplify: they both simplify and complexity at a righty similar rate, staying somewhat even
- English got simpler than most because of big cultural waves of adult new language learners
- (Spanish added a formal pronoun to Latin)
- Shakespeare used the thou and you divide: in hello, higher rank uses thou down whereas Iago uses the “you “ upward to his master
- Plural You has been replaced with youse y’all and you guys
- Yorkshire: don’t you thou those who thou you
- “Almost any language in Anglophone has more ways of saying you than English does, not to mention the languages Anglophones don’t usually learn”
- Wouldn’t it make perfect sense for you to be “yous”?
- Youse is used in Stephen Crane’s “Maggie a girl of the streets” 1893
- James Joyce used Yiz which other Anglo Irish did (In Dubkijers)
- Youse and y’all sometimes cartoonishly misunderstood as replacing singular you rather than doing an entirely normal thing of filling the missing plural second person. Sometimes when it’s used to refer to the singular it’s a kind of politeness like French using vous for singular
- “Y’all is exquisite, the closest an English speaker can get to knowing how it feels to use polite pronouns, like vous and Russians, VY with one person”
- “All y’all” also used differently to show distance
- Pitcairn English
- Gonna is grammaticalization for future tense, just let’s with an apostrophe becoming something different than “let us’
- Working class use of “boss” is the start of a formal pronoun
- The singular they “is it itself a kind of coated politeness, inside typing a specification of gender, and thus keeping the camera lens at a certain distance from the person referred to”
- English does have casual and polite:
- I / us, this nigga,
- You / y’all, hey boss, us/we
- He/she they
- James Pennebaker: we means 5 things
- Jamaican patois
- Tom’s book: the apostrophe is from replacing the Middle English of “his:” would have been “Tom his book”
- “It” is a pronoun that lacks animacy — other languages have an animacy marker like Spanish (kiss a person versus kiss N apple)
- Russian can use it for non-binary people because all three of its genders describe physical and non physical things
- Baltimore: “yo” as gender-neutral pronoun alongside yo for yo sistah (short for your), Yo! Interjection or the New York empathy/agreement “yo” at the end of sentences
- “They” first emerged in northern England , by 900 CE in four gospels being translated into old English
- Chaucer used singular “they,” as did many others but really there was always an implied plural reference as a polite open ended. The new purely singular “they” is new and the two causes are helping each other (more than entirely new pronouns)
- They as plural rule: 1745 Ann Fisher, and then widely popularized by 1794 Lindley Murray influential landmark grammar book
- “ a brand, new gender, neutral, specific pronoun will almost certainly never get off the ground”
- The singular “they” for gender identity has a good chance to make root because it’s solving another longstanding problem: English lost the gender neutral specific pronoun unlike Chinese and Japanese and Finnish— proto Indian European pronouns from 6,000 year’s ago are recognizable to descendant languages today, Juwoi and Kusunda that separated 60k years ago also have recognizable pronouns which shows just how durable they are. (The brake and gas of the car rather than the headlights)
- Getting Americans to use “homeless person” rather than bum or tramp was less difficult because it was used so much less than pronouns which are resistant to change
- For older folks with entrenched habits, learning the new pronoun is a bit like learning to drive on the wrong side of the road “learnable, but goodness, one must attend closely at first”
They want or they w