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from Wikipedia
In Modern English, they is a third-person pronoun relating to a grammatical subject.
Morphology
[edit]In Standard Modern English, they has five distinct word forms:[1]
- they: the nominative (subjective) form
- them: the accusative (objective, called the 'oblique'.[2]: 146 ) and a non-standard determinative form.
- their: the dependent genitive (possessive) form
- theirs: independent genitive form
- themselves: prototypical reflexive form
- themself: derivative reflexive form (nonstandard; now chiefly used instead of "himself or herself" as a reflexive epicenity for they in pronominal reference to a singular referent)[3]
History
[edit]Old English had a single third-person pronoun hē, which had both singular and plural forms, and they wasn't among them. In or about the start of the 13th century, they was imported from a Scandinavian source (Old Norse þeir, Old Danish, Old Swedish þer, þair), in which it was a masculine plural demonstrative pronoun. It comes from Proto-Germanic *thai, nominative plural pronoun, from PIE *to-, demonstrative pronoun.[4] According to The Cambridge History of the English Language:[5]
By Chaucer's time the th- form has been adopted in London for the subject case only, whereas the oblique cases remain in their native form (hem, here < OE heom, heora). At the same period (and indeed before), Scots texts, such as Barbour's Bruce, have the th- form in all cases.
The development in Middle English is shown in the following table. At the final stage, it had reached its modern form.
| I | II | III | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | þei | þei | þei |
| Oblique | hem | hem | hem ~ þem |
| Genitive | her[e] | her[e] ~ þeir | þeir |
Singular they
[edit]Singular they is a use of they as an epicene (gender-neutral) pronoun for a singular referent.[7][8] In this usage, they follows plural agreement rules (they are, not *they is), but the semantic reference is singular. Unlike plural they, singular they is only used for people. For this reason, it could be considered to have personal gender. Some people refuse to use the epicene pronoun they when referring to individuals on the basis that it is primarily a plural pronoun instead of a singular pronoun.[9][10][11] However, the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary records usage of they "referring to an individual generically or indefinitely", with examples dating to 2008–2009.[12]
Word of the year
[edit]In December 2019, Merriam-Webster chose singular they as word of the year. The word was chosen because "English famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun to correspond neatly with singular pronouns like everyone or someone, and as a consequence they has been used for this purpose for over 600 years."[13]
Syntax
[edit]Functions
[edit]They can appear as a subject, object, determiner or predicative complement.[1] The reflexive form also appears as an adjunct.
- Subject: "They're there"; "them being there"; "their being there".
- Object: "I saw them"; "I directed her to them"; "They connect to themselves."
- Predicative complement: "In our attempt to fight evil, we have become them"; "They eventually felt they had become themselves."
- Dependent determiner: "I touched their car"; "them folks are helpful" (non-standard).
- Independent determiner: "This is theirs."
- Adjunct: "They did it themselves."
Dependents
[edit]Pronouns rarely take dependents, but it is possible for they to have many of the same kind of dependents as other noun phrases.
- Relative clause modifier: "they who arrive late".
- Determiner: "Sometimes, when you think, 'I will show them', the 'them' you end up showing is yourself."
- Adjective phrase modifier: "the real them".
- Adverb phrase external modifier: "not even them".
Semantics
[edit]Plural they's referents can be anything, including persons, as long as it does not include the speaker (which would require we) or the addressee(s) (which would require you). Singular they can only refer to individual persons. Until the end of the 20th century, this was limited to those whose gender is unknown (e.g., "Someone's here. I wonder what they want"; "That person over there seems to be waving their hands at us.").[14]
Generic
[edit]The pronoun they can also be used to refer to an unspecified group of people[15], as in "In Japan they drive on the left", or "They are putting in a new restaurant across the street." It often refers to the authorities, or to some perceived powerful group, sometimes sinister: "They don't want the public to know the whole truth."
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ a b Huddleston, Rodney; Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge University Press.
- ^ Lass, Roger, ed. (1999). The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. III: 1476–1776. Cambridge University Press.
- ^ "themself: pronoun". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. 2021. Retrieved 26 November 2023.
- ^ Harper, Douglas (2017). "Origin and meaning of they: they (pron.)". Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 20 March 2021.
- ^ Blake, Norman, ed. (1992). The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. II: 1066–1476. Cambridge University Press. p. 176.
- ^ Blake (1992), p. 121
- ^ Bjorkman, B. (2017). "Singular They and the Syntactic Representation of Gender in English". Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics. 2: 80. doi:10.5334/gjgl.374.
- ^ "'He or She' Versus 'They'". OxfordDictionaries.com. Oxford University Press. 15 December 2011. Archived from the original on 15 December 2011. Retrieved 26 November 2023.
- ^ Hanna, Alex; Stevens, Nikki L.; Keyes, Os; Ahmed, Maliha (3 May 2019). "Actually, We Should Not All Use They/Them Pronouns". Voices (blog). ScientificAmerican.com. Retrieved 26 November 2023.
- ^ Murphy, Jessica (4 November 2016). "Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson Takes on Gender-Neutral Pronouns". BBC News. Retrieved 26 November 2023.
- ^ McBride, Jason (25 January 2017). "The Pronoun Warrior". Toronto Life. Retrieved 26 November 2023.
- ^ "they: pronoun". Oxford English Dictionary (online ed.). Oxford University Press. 2013. I.2.b. Retrieved 26 November 2023.
- ^ Locker, Melissa (10 December 2019). "Merriam Webster Names 'They' As Its Word of the Year for 2019". Time. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
- ^ Lagunoff, Rachel (1997). Singular They (PhD). University of California, Los Angeles. OCLC 39259660.
- ^ "they". Cambridge Dictionaries (Online). Cambridge University Press. n.d. Retrieved 25 August 2025.
from Grokipedia
They is the subjective form of the third-person plural personal pronoun in Modern English, denoting two or more persons or things distinct from the speaker and addressee, with corresponding objective them and possessive their. Borrowed from Old Norse þeir around 1200 CE during the Danelaw period, it displaced the native Old English hīe or hie by circa 1400, providing clearer phonological distinction from singular he amid sound shifts that merged forms.[1]
Historically employed in singular constructions since at least 1375 for indefinite antecedents—as in "Hastely hi arose... for thei had a greet affray" from the medieval romance William and the Werewolf—singular they appears in literature by Chaucer, Shakespeare (e.g., "There's not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend"), and Austen, serving generic purposes like "someone lost their hat" without specifying gender or number precisely.[2][3]
Its contemporary extension to definite singular reference, particularly for individuals rejecting binary sex-based pronouns, has provoked contention between descriptive linguists observing usage trends and prescriptive grammarians upholding number agreement as a core syntactic rule, citing ambiguities in verb conjugation (e.g., "they is/are"), reflexives (themself vs. themselves), and contextual clarity.[4][5] Eighteenth-century grammarians first condemned such singular they for violating antecedent-pronoun concordance, a critique echoed in formal style guides like Chicago and MLA that favor alternatives to avoid logical inconsistency, even as dictionaries like Merriam-Webster have descriptively endorsed it amid cultural shifts.[2][4] This evolution reflects not mere organic change but ideological advocacy prioritizing perceived inclusivity over established grammatical utility, with critics arguing it erodes precision without historical precedent for known specific referents.[4][6]
In singular uses of "they," the reflexive form "themselves" is conventionally employed, but "themself" has gained limited traction as a morphologically consistent variant since the late 20th century, aligning with singular antecedents like "someone" or "themselves" in indefinite contexts; however, "themself" remains contested in prescriptive grammars favoring plural consistency.[15][16]
Phonetically, "they" is realized as /ðeɪ/ across standard varieties of English, while "them" appears as /ðɛm/ in stressed positions and /ðəm/ when unstressed or cliticized.[17] Regional dialects exhibit minimal variation in these core forms, though some Southern U.S. varieties occasionally extend "them" to demonstrative functions (e.g., "them books" for "those books"), without altering the personal pronoun paradigm itself. Archaic Middle English variants included "þei" for nominative and "hem" for objective forms, derived from Old Norse influences that displaced native Old English "hīe."[18]
Etymology and Forms
Morphological Structure
The English pronoun they derives from the Old Norse nominative plural þeir (or ðeir), borrowed during the Viking Age settlements and integrated into Middle English around the 12th to 13th centuries, displacing the native Old English third-person plural hīe or hēo.[1][7][8] This Scandinavian influence reflects phonetic and morphological assimilation, with they adopting the role of nominative subject for third-person plural reference. Morphologically, they functions as the nominative (subjective) case in the third-person plural paradigm, inflecting for case, possession, and reflexivity but not for gender or number in its base form.[9] The oblique (objective) form is them, used for accusative and dative functions; the possessive adjective is their, modifying nouns; the independent possessive pronoun is theirs; and the reflexive forms are themselves for plural or themself in singular-compatible uses.[9][10] These inflections exhibit analytic rather than synthetic marking typical of modern English pronouns, relying on distinct lexical roots rather than affixation, which originated in the Norse paradigm's own case distinctions.[1] The plural morphology of they has prompted historical prescriptive concerns over number agreement when extended to singular antecedents, as grammarians from the 18th century onward emphasized strict concord between antecedent number and pronoun form.[11][12]Declension and Variants
The third-person plural pronoun "they" follows a declension paradigm in modern English that distinguishes case through distinct forms, though English has largely lost inflectional endings compared to older Indo-European languages.[13]| Case/Form | Plural |
|---|---|
| Nominative (subject) | they |
| Accusative (direct object) | them |
| Dative (indirect object/prepositional) | them |
| Possessive adjective | their |
| Possessive pronoun | theirs |
| Reflexive/Intensive | themselves |
Historical Development
Early Usage in English Literature
The earliest documented instance of singular "they" with an indefinite antecedent appears in the Middle English romance William and the Werewolf, composed around 1375 as a translation of the Old French Guillaume de Palerme. In this text, the construction refers to an unspecified individual in a generic sense, as in the line where each person considers their own counsel superior, predating formalized grammatical prescriptions and reflecting natural usage for avoiding gender specification.[11][3] Geoffrey Chaucer employed singular "they" similarly in The Canterbury Tales, written between approximately 1387 and 1400, to denote indefinite persons without specifying sex. A representative example occurs in "The Pardoner's Prologue," where the narrator states: "And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame, / They wol come up...," using "they" to refer back to an anonymous "whoso" (whoever) who escapes moral fault, illustrating its role in hypothetical or general scenarios.[19][20] William Shakespeare incorporated singular "they" in several plays for generic singular references, notably in The Comedy of Errors (first performed around 1594), with the line: "There's not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend." Here, "their" antecedents an indefinite "a man," emphasizing familiarity without gender markers, a pattern consistent across Elizabethan drama for neutral, non-specific antecedents.[21][22][3] Such usages were commonplace in pre-18th-century English literature for indefinite or generic contexts, such as referring to "someone who loses their keys" or "a person and their belongings," prioritizing referential clarity over rigid number agreement.[11][19]Prescriptivist Opposition from the 18th Century
In the mid-18th century, English grammarian Ann Fisher, in her 1745 publication A New Grammar, first explicitly proscribed the use of singular "they" by declaring "he" to be the universal pronoun applicable to both sexes in generic contexts, thereby establishing a prescriptive preference for masculine forms over indefinite plural pronouns to maintain number agreement.[23] This stance reflected emerging demands for grammatical consistency modeled on classical languages, where pronouns strictly matched antecedents in number and gender, with masculine forms serving as defaults for mixed or indefinite references.[23] Lindley Murray reinforced this opposition in his widely influential 1795 English Grammar, which labeled constructions using "their" with singular indefinite antecedents—such as "every one...does their duty"—as examples of erroneous syntax due to the plural form disagreeing with a singular subject.[24] Murray's text, reprinted over 50 times by 1800 and used in schools across Britain and America, popularized the rule that pronouns must agree precisely with antecedents, drawing analogies to Latin grammar's rigid concord rules to argue against what prescriptivists viewed as illogical deviations in English.[25] This prescriptive framework prioritized formal analogy to inflected languages like Latin, where no equivalent to English's singular "they" existed, over the language's native analytic tendencies that historically tolerated such flexibility.[23] The opposition persisted into the 20th century, as evidenced in William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White's 1959 revision of The Elements of Style, which advised writers to avoid "their" with singular generics like "everyone," recommending instead rephrasing to plural subjects or using "his" to uphold strict agreement and clarity.[26] Such guides maintained the 18th-century logic of number consistency, dismissing singular "they" as informal or imprecise despite its longstanding attestation in literature, thereby embedding the prohibition in formal writing standards.[27]20th-Century Revival for Generic Reference
By the mid-20th century, singular "they" experienced renewed practical application for generic reference to indefinite persons in spoken English and informal writing, where prescriptivist rules against it were often ignored for convenience. This usage persisted in contexts requiring gender-neutral reference, such as describing unknown individuals in narratives; for instance, detective fiction employed "they" to denote unidentified suspects or perpetrators until their gender was revealed, reflecting everyday linguistic efficiency over strict grammatical conformity.[28] Corpus evidence from the Brown Corpus, a 1-million-word collection of 1961 American English texts across genres like fiction and journalism, documents instances of singular "they" with indefinite antecedents (e.g., "someone" or "anyone"), demonstrating its endurance in published writing despite formal style guides' endorsements of alternatives like generic "he" or rephrasing. This frequency, though not dominant, underscored a gap between prescriptive norms and actual usage, with singular "they" appearing naturally in about 1 in 300 potential epicene pronoun slots in mid-century prose.[29] In the 1970s, feminist linguistic critiques targeted the generic "he" as perpetuating male-centric assumptions by rendering women invisible in indefinite references, prompting partial shifts toward gender-neutral options. Organizations like the Modern Language Association issued guidelines around 1975 advocating "he or she" or restructuring sentences to avoid pronouns altogether, marking an incremental tolerance for non-male defaults without fully embracing singular "they" in academic or formal prose due to lingering agreement concerns.[30] These reforms, driven by empirical observations of language's causal role in social perception, highlighted singular "they"'s utility but prioritized conservative alternatives amid institutional resistance.[31]Generic Singular They
Syntactic Roles and Examples
The generic singular they and its inflected forms (them, their, theirs) serve as pronouns referring to indefinite singular antecedents, functioning in syntactic roles such as subject, direct or indirect object, object of a preposition, and possessive determiner.[32][33] In subject position, they pairs with plural verb agreement despite the singular antecedent, as in: "If a surgeon forgets their scalpel, they could endanger the patient."[34][20] This construction appears in informal and some formal registers, though prescriptivists historically critiqued the number mismatch, favoring alternatives like he or she to align with singular verbs.[35] As a direct object, them receives the action of the verb with an indefinite antecedent, exemplified by: "Anyone who arrives late must notify their supervisor or risk dismissal from them."[36] In possessive role, their modifies a noun to indicate ownership by the indefinite referent, such as: "A voter should check their registration status before election day."[34] These roles maintain anaphoric links to antecedents like someone, anyone, or a person, preserving sentence cohesion without specifying gender or number beyond the generic singular intent.[32] This usage contrasts with distributive plural pronouns, where antecedents denote multiple entities and pronouns distribute over them individually, as in "The passengers boarded their flights," referring to each passenger's distinct flight.[20] In generic singular they, the antecedent implies a single hypothetical individual from a broader category, avoiding collective or distributive plurality while still employing plural pronoun morphology for neutrality.[29] Formal styles may sidestep this by rephrasing to enforce singular consistency, but empirical corpus data from modern English affirm its syntactic viability in indefinite contexts.[36]Semantic Functions in Indefinite Contexts
The generic singular "they" operates semantically as an indefinite pronoun that refers to an unspecified individual or class of individuals, functioning within referential frameworks to denote hypothetical or generalized human agents without presupposing particular identities. This usage parallels indefinite singulars in generic contexts, where the pronoun evokes a representative instance rather than a definite entity, as seen in constructions like "A driver should always check their mirrors before merging."[37] Such referential indeterminacy allows "they" to serve as a neutral placeholder equivalent to "one" or an impersonal subject, facilitating discourse about arbitrary persons in normative or advisory statements.[38] In sentences involving quantifiers, generic "they" anaphorically aligns with the scope of universal or existential operators, effectively distributing reference across potential referents in a manner akin to logical generics rather than strict universal quantification. For instance, "Everyone must respect their privacy" treats "they" as bound to the universal "everyone," conveying a generalized obligation applicable to any individual within the domain, distinct from explicit quantifiers like "all" that do not inherently license such pronominal resumption.[39] This semantic role underscores "they"'s capacity to express habitual or normative truths about kinds, where the indefinite reference abstracts from specifics to emphasize typical behaviors or rules.[40] Corpus-based examinations reveal that generic "they" prevails in hypothetical scenarios and proverbial-like generalizations, comprising a significant portion of indefinite pronoun occurrences in modern English texts and speech. In analyses of newspaper corpora from the late 20th century onward, singular "they" accounts for increasing instances of generic reference in conditional or advisory hypotheticals, such as "If a customer complains, they should be offered a refund," reflecting its entrenchment in expressing rules applicable to unspecified actors.[41] Empirical surveys of pronoun usage further confirm its dominance over alternatives in contexts prioritizing referential flexibility, with singular "they" emerging as the modal choice for gender-unspecified generics in diverse registers.[42]Emergence of Specific Singular They
Shift to Known Individuals Pre-2010s
Prior to the 2010s, singular they occasionally referred to specific individuals whose gender remained undetermined, marking a pragmatic extension from indefinite generics into definite but ambiguous contexts, such as hypothetical persons or unidentified actors in legal and descriptive writing. A notable early instance appears in Lord Chesterfield's 1759 correspondence: "If a person is born of a... gloomy temper... they cannot help it," where "they" anaphorically resolves to the singular antecedent "a person" without specified gender.[43] Such constructions treated the referent as a concrete individual while sidestepping binary pronouns due to informational gaps, though they were sporadic and often confined to less formal registers. This application persisted into the 20th century in domains like legal drafting and procedural accounts, where antecedents denoted particular but gender-obscured entities, as in references to "the offender" or "the witness" followed by they-forms when details were withheld.[43] Unlike later identity-linked adoption, these pre-2010s instances lacked ideological motivation, prioritizing referential clarity over grammatical purity amid prescriptivist preferences for generic "he" or periphrastic alternatives. Linguistic scholarship before 1990 focused predominantly on epicene or indefinite uses, underscoring the niche status of definite specific references and their avoidance in rigidly formal prose.[44] Oxford English Dictionary citations through the 1990s document analogous patterns, confirming restrained uptake without broader cultural framing.[11]Post-2010s Adoption in Identity Contexts
In the mid-2010s, the use of singular "they" expanded to refer specifically to individuals identifying as non-binary or genderqueer, coinciding with increased advocacy for gender-neutral language in media and public discourse. The Washington Post updated its style guide in December 2015 to permit singular "they" for individuals who do not identify with traditional binary genders, marking an early institutional endorsement in major journalism.[45] This shift aligned with broader cultural visibility of non-binary identities, facilitated by social media platforms where users began specifying "they/them" pronouns in bios and profiles around 2015–2016.[4] Public figures accelerated adoption by publicly requesting singular "they" pronouns. Singer Sam Smith announced on September 13, 2019, via social media that they identify as non-binary and would use "they/them" pronouns, citing a personal journey of reconciling gender identity after years of internal conflict.[46] This declaration, shared on Twitter (now X) and Instagram, garnered widespread media coverage and exemplified how celebrity endorsements normalized the practice among self-identified non-binary individuals.[47] LGBTQ+ advocacy groups reinforced this trend through guidelines urging media to employ singular "they" for non-binary people. GLAAD's media reference resources, which recommend "they/them" as a gender-neutral option without connotations of binary gender, have been cited in journalistic training since at least the mid-2010s to promote accurate representation of transgender and non-binary identities.[48] The American Dialect Society similarly recognized singular "they" as its Word of the Year in 2015, highlighting its emerging role in discussions of gender identity.[32] By 2019, dictionary lookup data quantified the surge: Merriam-Webster reported a 313% increase in searches for "they" compared to 2018, attributing this primarily to its singular non-binary usage for people whose gender identity falls outside the male-female binary.[49] The publisher named singular "they" its Word of the Year for 2019, noting its addition to the dictionary as a non-binary pronoun definition amid rising cultural debates on gender.[50] This metric reflected not just generic usage but targeted interest in identity-specific applications, driven by online discussions and advocacy campaigns.[51]Grammatical Analysis
Subject-Verb Agreement Challenges
The use of singular they introduces a mismatch in number agreement because the pronoun, despite referring to a singular antecedent, morphologically aligns with plural forms and thus pairs with plural verbs in standard English, such as "Someone left their keys here; they are on the table."[52] This contrasts with the singular verb expected for the antecedent alone, as in "Someone is calling," creating a theoretical tension where semantic singularity clashes with grammatical plurality.[53] Linguists observe that this plural verb dominance persists idiomatically, akin to the treatment of singular you, prioritizing morphological consistency over strict antecedent-verb alignment.[54] In complex sentences, this agreement pattern can generate parsing ambiguities, particularly when they coordinates with plural nouns or intervenes in structures requiring number resolution, such as "A reader of this guide, along with several critics, believes they are mistaken."[55] Here, the plural verb are attaches to they, but proximity to mixed-number subjects risks misattribution of plurality, complicating real-time comprehension without contextual cues.[56] Dialectal variations mitigate this in some non-standard varieties, including African American Vernacular English (AAVE), where singular verbs occasionally pair with they to better reflect semantic singularity, as in "they is coming."[57] Empirical descriptions of AAVE note such invariant or marginal subject-verb agreement, allowing forms like they is or they was that align verb number more closely with a singular referent, diverging from mainstream English's plural default.[57] These patterns, documented in sociolinguistic corpora, highlight how agreement flexibility in AAVE reduces the theoretical conflict inherent in standard usage.[58]Anaphoric Reference and Resolvability
In discourse, anaphoric resolution of singular "they" depends on principles such as recency (proximity to the antecedent) and salience (prominence in context), which guide interpreters to link the pronoun to its intended singular referent.[59] However, the inherent plural morphology of "they" complicates this process by predisposing resolvers—human or algorithmic—to favor plural antecedents or conjoined singulars, thereby increasing the risk of erroneous linkages when multiple entities are salient.[60] This morphological mismatch often manifests in ambiguities, such as potential split-antecedent interpretations where "they" appears to conjoint two singulars introduced nearby. For instance, in "The politician met their supporter; they shook hands," the anaphor "they" may initially resolve to both the politician and supporter as a collective plural entity, requiring reanalysis to the singular supporter as intended.[60] Such constructions exploit the pronoun's number-agnostic form but heighten resolvability demands, as the plural signal invites broader antecedent searches over singular specificity.[61] Computational linguistics research quantifies these challenges through coreference resolution benchmarks, revealing markedly lower performance for singular "they" than for binary-gendered or unambiguous plurals. State-of-the-art systems, trained primarily on corpora with traditional pronoun-antecedent alignments, attain only 20-30% accuracy in identifying coreference for singular personal "they," compared to 60-80% on standard datasets dominated by he/she or plural they.[62] These error rates stem from models' reliance on gender and number features, which falter without explicit singular markers, underscoring the pronoun's resolvability deficits in automated discourse processing.[63]Semantic and Cognitive Dimensions
Interpretation in Generic vs. Specific Uses
In generic uses, singular they functions semantically as an indefinite or distributive pronoun, referring to a hypothetical, non-specific individual or a class abstracted from particulars, without committing to a unique referent. This aligns with antecedents that are quantificational (e.g., "everyone"), indefinite (e.g., "someone"), or epicene (unknown gender), as in "A driver should check their mirrors," where they distributes properties over potential instances of the role rather than denoting a concrete person.[64] Such constructions avoid gender specification by treating the subject as non-referential, preserving semantic generality and compatibility with singular verb agreement through contextual inference.[64] Specific uses of singular they, by contrast, attempt deictic reference to a definite, known individual, often in contexts asserting non-binary gender identity, as in "Alex said they prefer the window seat," where they targets a singular entity with purportedly indeterminate gender. Semantically, this imposes a gender-neutral interpretation on the pronoun, signaling silence or absence of binary classification, but it strains the form's prototypical association with plurality or indefiniteness, potentially yielding underspecification for a referent expected to have determinate features.[65] Linguistic analyses note that while innovative speakers extend they to such definite antecedents, coreference fails with gender-marked nouns (e.g., "the actress" blocks they due to feature mismatch), highlighting syntactic-semantic barriers to seamless reference.[64] Philosophical scrutiny of specific they centers on potential reference failure when applied to biologically sexed individuals claiming non-binary status, as the pronoun's neutrality presupposes an ontology decoupling gender from observable sex dimorphism, which may render ascriptions truth-conditionally defective if sex determines referential identity. For instance, using they to evade binary pronouns risks misrepresenting the referent's fixed biological substrate, akin to applying a plural descriptor to a unitary object and inviting semantic ambiguity in identity claims.[66] This tension underscores debates over whether such usage achieves accurate denotation or instead embeds contestable metaphysical assumptions about gender fluidity.[66]Empirical Studies on Processing and Comprehension
A self-paced reading study published in Applied Linguistics in 2019 examined the online processing of singular "they" compared to "he" and "she" among learners of English as a second language, finding that singular "they" elicited longer reading times at the pronoun itself and subsequent regions when the antecedent lacked explicit gender cues, indicating initial disruption in resolving gender information during comprehension.[67] Native English speakers in a related 2015 reading-time experiment demonstrated that singular "they" serves as a cognitively efficient alternative to generic "he" or "she" in indefinite, non-specific contexts, with no significant processing penalty relative to gendered pronouns for abstract or hypothetical referents.[29] However, subsequent research on specific singular "they"—referring to a known individual—has revealed elevated processing costs, including slower reading times and reduced acceptability ratings, particularly when contrasting with plural "they," due to number ambiguity and the need for additional contextual inference to override default plural interpretations.[68] Empirical surveys on comprehension attitudes highlight demographic variations in familiarity and ease. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that 61% of U.S. adults aged 18-29 reported being somewhat or very comfortable using gender-neutral pronouns like singular "they" when requested, compared to 44% of those aged 30-49 and 38% of those 50 and older, with comfort levels also differing by gender and political affiliation—higher among women (59%) than men (45%) and among Democrats (65%) than Republicans (39%).[69] Overall, 52% of respondents expressed comfort with such usage, though only 18% personally knew someone preferring gender-neutral pronouns, suggesting limited real-world exposure contributing to comprehension gaps for older or less progressive groups.[69] Cross-linguistic analyses underscore English's unique challenges with singular "they" due to its pronoun system's sparsity—lacking dedicated singular neutral forms unlike languages such as Swedish ("hen") or Finnish (genderless pronouns)—which amplifies resolvability issues in anaphoric reference.[70] Event-related potential studies in second-language acquisition reveal that non-native English speakers experience heightened anticipatory processing demands for singular "they" when cross-linguistic gender marking differs from their L1, leading to delayed neural integration compared to native-like gendered pronoun resolution.[71] No experimental evidence links singular "they" adoption to causal reductions in gender bias; processing studies focus on efficiency metrics without demonstrating broader attitudinal shifts from pronoun use alone.[29]Controversies and Criticisms
Grammatical and Logical Objections
Critics of singular they argue that English grammar requires pronouns to agree in number with their antecedents, a principle rooted in the language's morphological and syntactic systems where singular and plural forms are morphologically distinct to signal referential clarity.[72] This objection traces to 18th-century grammarians, including Lindley Murray in his English Grammar (1795), who explicitly condemned the shift from singular "he" to plural "they" for indefinite antecedents as a violation of logical consistency in pronoun usage.[73] Modern prescriptivist grammars echo this, asserting that using a morphologically plural pronoun for a singular referent undermines the systematic distinction between singular (he, she, it) and plural (they) forms, potentially eroding the precision of number marking in the pronominal paradigm.[4] Logically, this mismatch introduces inconsistency because English verbs and other elements often inflect or contextually align with pronoun number; for instance, singular they lacks a corresponding singular verb form (unlike he/she/it with third-person singular -s), forcing reliance on context that can conflict with default plural interpretations.[72] Psycholinguistic evidence supports claims of heightened referential ambiguity, as language processors use number agreement as a rapid cue for antecedent resolution; studies show that ambiguous or mismatched pronouns like singular they slow disambiguation in sentences with competing referents, increasing error rates in comprehension tasks compared to unambiguous singular forms.[74] In bound-variable contexts, where they corefers to a quantified singular antecedent (e.g., "Every student thinks they passed"), processing demands additional inferential steps, as evidenced by longer reading times and reduced accuracy in eye-tracking experiments.[72] Historical corpus analyses of formal English prose reveal consistent avoidance of singular they in high-register texts from the 19th to mid-20th centuries, with grammars and style manuals prescribing singular alternatives to maintain number fidelity; for example, major guides like those preceding the 17th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (pre-2017) recommended against it in edited writing to uphold traditional agreement rules.[4] This pattern persisted despite earlier informal uses, reflecting a deliberate prescriptivist enforcement of logical number alignment until shifts in usage norms post-2010.[2]Ideological Imposition and Compelled Speech
Critics contend that institutional mandates requiring the use of preferred pronouns, such as the singular "they," amount to compelled speech by obliging individuals to linguistically affirm a specific ideological framework on gender, potentially at the expense of free expression. In Canada, this issue crystallized during debates over Bill C-16, which received royal assent on June 19, 2017, and amended the Canadian Human Rights Act to include gender identity and gender expression as prohibited grounds for discrimination.[75] Opponents argued the legislation's implications extended to enforcing pronoun usage, as refusal could be construed as discriminatory under human rights codes.[76] University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson emerged as a prominent voice against the bill in 2016, producing videos and testifying that mandating pronouns like "they/them" for non-binary individuals would compel endorsement of a contested view detaching gender from biological sex, elevating non-compliance to potential hate speech under the Criminal Code.[77] [78] Peterson framed this as ideological overreach, asserting that truth claims about sex and gender should not be legislated into language, drawing on principles of voluntary discourse over state-enforced conformity. Post-enactment, Canadian human rights tribunals have upheld this practical effect: in a 2021 British Columbia case, a tribunal awarded $30,000 in damages against an employer for a co-worker's deliberate refusal to use a transgender colleague's preferred pronouns, ruling it constituted harassment and a human rights violation.[79] [80] Similar rulings, such as a 2024 federal tribunal decision finding persistent misgendering discriminatory, reinforce that workplaces must accommodate pronoun preferences or face penalties, regardless of the bill's lack of explicit pronoun language.[81] In the United States, federal interpretations of Title IX have prompted analogous policies in educational and workplace settings, where refusal to use preferred pronouns has led to discipline. Guidance from the Department of Education under the Biden administration, culminating in 2024 regulations expanding Title IX to cover gender identity discrimination, encouraged schools to adopt pronoun mandates, with non-compliance risking loss of funding or internal sanctions.[82] A federal court vacated these rules nationwide in January 2025, citing overreach including compelled speech elements, yet prior implementations affected institutions.[83] Notable cases include a 2022 settlement where a university paid $400,000 to resolve a lawsuit from a philosophy professor disciplined for declining to use a transgender student's pronouns in class, highlighting tensions between accommodation duties and expressive freedoms.[84] Advocates for free speech maintain these mandates impose a substantive worldview—positing gender as self-determined and ontologically prior to biology—rather than mere politeness, as using "they" for a specific individual signals acceptance of fluid identity categories unsupported by empirical consensus on sex dimorphism.[76] They argue such coercion undermines causal realism, where language should reflect observable realities like chromosomal and anatomical sex differences, and predict it engenders resentment by prioritizing ideological conformity over reasoned persuasion, though direct longitudinal studies on attitudinal shifts remain scarce. Mainstream institutional sources often frame compliance as anti-discrimination, but critics, wary of biases in rights bodies toward expansive interpretations, view tribunal outcomes as evidence of de facto speech regulation.[78]Empirical Gaps in Claimed Benefits
Advocates for singular they in identity contexts often assert psychological benefits, such as reduced gender dysphoria and improved mental health, from its use as a gender-neutral pronoun. Empirical support for these claims, however, reveals significant gaps, with most evidence limited to correlational associations rather than causal mechanisms. Systematic reviews of social gender affirmation, including pronoun usage, rely on self-reported surveys that show links to lower distress but fail to control for confounders like concurrent therapies or selection bias in gender-diverse samples.[85] [86] No high-quality randomized controlled trials or robust longitudinal studies establish that adopting singular they—or preferred pronouns generally—causally improves outcomes like anxiety or self-esteem. Cross-sectional data predominates, and critiques highlight methodological weaknesses, including small samples and reliance on advocacy-influenced reporting, which inflate perceived benefits without isolating pronoun effects from broader affirmation practices.[87] [88] Cognitive processing studies further undermine neutrality claims, demonstrating that singular they does not eliminate gender biases in comprehension. Experimental work finds persistent male defaults, where neutral pronouns evoke masculine imagery even in genderless linguistic contexts, suggesting androcentric heuristics override intended inclusivity.[89] [90] Prioritizing singular they adoption carries opportunity costs, diverting resources from verifiable interventions for gender-related distress, such as treating underlying comorbidities. This focus coincides with post-2020 increases in detransition reports, where discontinuation rates for gender-affirming hormones reached 30-36% over four years in some cohorts, often linked to unresolved psychological factors rather than external pressures alone; such trends underscore needs for sex-based safeguards over linguistic reforms lacking proven efficacy.[91] [92] [93]Cultural and Institutional Reception
Style Guides and Media Policies
The Associated Press Stylebook introduced guidance on singular "they" in 2017, permitting its use as a gender-neutral pronoun in limited circumstances, such as when rephrasing would result in awkward or clumsy alternatives, primarily for generic references where an individual's gender is unknown.[94] By 2022, the Stylebook expanded this policy to recommend "they/them/their" for accurately describing individuals who self-identify with those pronouns, reflecting a shift toward accommodating known non-binary preferences while prioritizing clarity.[95] The Chicago Manual of Style's 17th edition, published in September 2017, acknowledged singular "they" as acceptable for generic antecedents in place of gendered pronouns but advised against it in formal writing, suggesting rephrasing or restructuring sentences to maintain singular agreement where feasible.[96] This approach balanced historical grammatical norms with emerging usage, without mandating adoption for specific identities. The American Psychological Association's Publication Manual, 7th edition, released in October 2019, explicitly endorsed singular "they" for both generic third-person references and as the preferred pronoun for individuals who use it, requiring writers to respect self-identified pronouns to avoid bias in psychological and academic discourse.[97] [34] Among media organizations, The Washington Post incorporated singular "they" into its style guide in 2015, allowing it as a gender-neutral option in editorial content.[98] Mainstream outlets largely followed suit in subsequent years, but selective adoption persists, with some conservative publications adhering to traditional singular verb agreement and rejecting its application to known individuals, citing grammatical precision over identity-based claims.Public Opinion and Demographic Variations
A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that 52% of U.S. adults reported being somewhat or very comfortable using a gender-neutral pronoun such as "they" to refer to someone, while 46% expressed discomfort.[69] Comfort levels varied sharply by political affiliation, with only 30% of Republicans indicating comfort compared to 65% of Democrats, implying approximately 70% unfavorable views among conservatives.[69] Demographic patterns revealed higher acceptance among younger adults, as 65% of those aged 18-29 were comfortable, versus 44% of those 50 and older.[69] Urban residents showed modestly greater familiarity and acceptance than rural ones, with 59% of urban adults having heard at least a little about gender-neutral pronouns compared to 50% in rural areas.[69] Religious affiliation correlated with resistance, particularly among white evangelical Protestants, where comfort levels trailed broader averages in subsequent surveys.[99] By 2023, a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) poll indicated 35% of Americans felt comfortable with a friend using gender-neutral pronouns, down from earlier peaks, with 40% uncomfortable and divides persisting along ideological lines—64% of Republicans uncomfortable versus 18% of Democrats.[100] Resistance remained elevated among those affirming binary sex distinctions, often overlapping with older, religiously conservative, and Republican-identifying groups, while younger cohorts, including 58% of older teen girls in a 2025 Pew survey, reported higher comfort.[101][102] These patterns suggest limited growth in acceptance post-2019 amid ongoing cultural debates.[99]Alternatives and Comparisons
Traditional Pronouns and Rewording Strategies
In English grammar, the generic "he" served as the historical default for referring to an indefinite singular antecedent of unspecified sex, as codified by eighteenth-century grammarians and exemplified in foundational documents such as the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1787, which employs "he" to denote the President in a gender-indeterminate capacity.[103][104] This convention prioritized grammatical consistency in number and person over explicit inclusivity, reflecting a linguistic tradition where masculine forms functioned as unmarked defaults without implying exclusion, though empirical tests later revealed it evoked male imagery in readers' minds more than neutral interpretations.[105] For achieving referential neutrality without altering established singular forms, paired constructions like "he or she" or the indefinite "one" offer precise alternatives that preserve number agreement and syntactic clarity. "He or she" explicitly accommodates both sexes while adhering to singular verb forms, as recommended in formal style guides prior to shifts toward other options, ensuring unambiguous reference in legal and academic prose. "One," derived from impersonal constructions, avoids sexed pronouns altogether, as in "One must consider one's options," maintaining impersonality in philosophical and instructional texts where the antecedent's identity remains irrelevant.[106] Rewording strategies further enable neutrality by restructuring sentences to sidestep pronouns, such as pluralizing the antecedent—"If a person seeks advice, people should consult their records"—which aligns pronouns with plural antecedents to eliminate sex ambiguity while retaining collective generality. Alternatively, repeating the noun substitutes for pronouns, e.g., "The voter must verify the voter's eligibility," reinforcing antecedent-pronoun links through redundancy and averting any form of grammatical innovation. These methods, endorsed in composition guides, uphold semantic precision without relying on contested pronoun reforms.[107][106] Such traditional approaches confer advantages in formal contexts by safeguarding number clarity, as indefinite singular antecedents paired with "he," "he or she," or rephrased nouns avoid the referential overlap inherent in forms that blur singular-plural distinctions, which can introduce processing delays in comprehension tasks involving multiple referents. Reading-time experiments indicate that structures maintaining strict number agreement facilitate quicker resolution of antecedents than those permitting number underspecification, supporting efficacy in dense, analytical writing where misresolution risks interpretive error.[4][108]Neopronouns and Cross-Linguistic Equivalents
Neopronouns refer to invented gender-neutral pronoun sets beyond traditional forms, such as xe/xem/xyr, first proposed by Don Rickter in a 1973 Unitarian Universalist publication.[109] Another early set, e/em/eir (Spivak pronouns), drew from 19th-century suggestions like those by James Rogers in 1890 but gained traction through 1977 proposals, including efforts by the Em Institute to promote em for common use by 1979.[110][111] Despite periodic advocacy, neopronouns exhibit extremely low adoption in English, with linguistic corpora and surveys indicating usage rates below 0.1% in general texts and even among self-identified nonbinary speakers, who predominantly favor singular they.[112] Cross-linguistically, some languages inherently avoid gendered third-person pronouns, obviating the need for neologisms. Finnish employs hän as a singular neutral form without grammatical gender distinctions, while Hungarian uses ő similarly, reflecting the absence of noun classes or pronoun gendering in Uralic languages.[113] In contrast, Swedish introduced hen—coined in the 1960s by feminist groups and re-popularized in 2012—into its official dictionary (SAOL) in April 2015 alongside 13,000 other terms, yet it has sparked ongoing debates over forced inclusion and practical uptake.[114][115] Empirical evidence underscores natural languages' preference for phonologically and morphologically entrenched pronouns, with novel forms like neopronouns elevating cognitive demands. Eye-tracking studies on Swedish hen reveal longer reading times and increased processing effort compared to gendered han/hon, signaling higher mental load from unfamiliar structures.[116] Similar patterns emerge in English acceptability judgments, where neopronouns elicit variability and resistance, correlating with limited spontaneous integration into speech or writing.[117] This aligns with broader psycholinguistic findings that pronouns function as low-load referential shortcuts, with innovations disrupting efficiency unless culturally normalized over generations.[118]References
- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/they