This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Pronouns - Little words, big jobs’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re going to be talking about pronouns and how these little words do a lot of work. But first, let’s talk about where our logo comes from.

Gretchen: When we were coming up with the idea that maybe we wanted to start a podcast, and we started talking about logos – because that’s the first thing, obviously – we realised that Superlinguo, Lauren’s blog, uses a yellow-green background, and my blog, AllThingsLinguistic, uses a teal background – kind of a blueish-green. So, we figured that a true green – a vivid green – was the logical way of splitting the difference between that.

Lauren: We’re both big green fans. We also have IPA symbols in both of our logos. Superlinguo has a schwa and AllThingsLinguistic has three – I can’t even remember, how bad is that? There’s a theta, I know that.

Gretchen: It’s alpha, theta, lambda. It’s an acronym.

Lauren: Ah, yeah, that makes sense.

Gretchen: But they’re also symbols that are used in linguistics.

Lauren: Nerdy linguistic symbol logos meant that we were gonna continue that theme with this one as well.

Gretchen: We ended up going with the one that we have which is a triple purpose logo. If you haven’t seen it, it’s presumably in the icon of whatever programme you’re using to listen to this podcast. The symbol that is there looks like the International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for a glottal stop, which is the sound in “uh-oh,” just kind of a puff of air in the back of your throat. But we got it by cutting off the dot at the bottom of a question mark because that gave us more font options.

Lauren: Unfortunately, disappointingly, few stylish fonts have full IPA range for the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Gretchen: We were very disappointed. This was actually one of the reasons why we picked the glottal stop because that way we could just chop off some question marks, and we’d have a lot more stuff to choose from.

Lauren: Then we liked that the end result of the one that we chose looks a little bit like a little ear.

Gretchen: It looks a little bit like an ear. It looks a little bit like a question mark itself because we are curious about things. It is also an IPA symbol.

Lauren: Because we are quite lingthusiastic about things.

Gretchen: We are very lingthusiastic. Yay! The name, I guess, probably should be pretty obvious.

[Music]

Lauren: Today, we are going to talk about pronouns, which some of you might have trauma of it sounds like a dirty word from grammar classes in high school, or some of you may be going into sweats from recollections of learning second languages. We think pronouns are pretty rad. So, today, we’re going to be talking about those.

Gretchen: Pronouns are fun. Pronouns, if you forget what they are, are these little words that stand in place of a noun. You have things like “I,” “me,” “you,” “your,” “our,” “we,” “she,” “he,” “it,” “they,” all of the little pronouns that do stuff like that. Instead of just continually repeating the noun, you can use a pronoun instead. Hypothetically, they’re a way of making language more efficient because you don’t have to just keep saying the noun over and over again. We’ve all had this conversation with people who keep repeating your name, and you’re like, “No, just stop.”

Lauren: It’s the creepy AI robots in sci-fi will always continue to refer to you by your full name, and it’s really creepy. “What are you doing, Hal? Hal, don’t do that.” It always includes that full noun reference. It’s super creepy in extended conversation.

Gretchen: If you wanna try this at home, creep out your friends by saying their names all the time in every sentence, and they’ll probably get annoyed at you.

Lauren: The thing that makes pronouns so interesting in conversation is, to use the fancy linguist term, they’re “deictic” – to use the actual what-does-that-mean term, they “point” at something. I always think of it as a pointing thing. It means that they don’t always point at exactly the same thing all the time. Where they point depends on the context in which they’re employed. It sounds painfully obvious until you’re trying to pull it apart in a language you don’t speak that well. But when I say “I” – “I,” for me, means “Lauren.” And “you” in this context means you, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Yes. It also means “you,” the listener, “you” plural. But when I say “I” – “I” means me, Gretchen, and not you, Lauren, because you’re a different person. The thing is, you can see little kids get this wrong. They’ll refer to themselves as “you” because that’s what everyone else calls them. They have to figure out, no, Mommy is “you,” and Daddy is “you,” and the dog is “you,” but I am “I.”

Lauren: “When I use it.”

Gretchen: “When I use it.” Little kids will get this wrong initially, often, when they’re learning a language. It’s not completely obvious to people, but it’s a very important insight when it comes to pronouns.

Lauren: That’s why robots in sci-fi sound really creepy, but it is something that’s quite hard to keep track of – these references and who is being referred to by which pronoun in conversation.

Gretchen: Different languages carve up the pronoun space differently. I think a lot of languages make this distinction between the person who’s doing the talking – so this is the “I” or “we,” I’m either talking on behalf of myself or on behalf of a group – and the person who’s being talked to, which is the “you” – “you” singular, “you” plural. English used to have “thou” and “thee” to be singular, second pronoun. Now, we have innovative forms like “you all” and “you guys” and “ya’ll” and a whole bunch of others.

Lauren: “Youse” – “youse” is the Australian one.

Gretchen: Ah, good. We have all of these different ways of covering up the pronoun space. Then in the third person pronouns, we have a whole bunch of different ways.

Lauren: Even within the first and second person – so the first being “me,” the second being “you” – even within those, there’re lots of different ways to carve up the space. Lots of different languages do different things that are really neat. One thing I like about Yolmo, which is a Tibetan language that I work with, is that they have inclusive and exclusive versions of “us.” The inclusion and exclusion is referring to the person that you’re speaking to. You can use one form, and it means, “We, including you who I’m talking to right now, are all gonna go to the cinema,” and then there’s a “We are all going to the cinema, but we’re not including you who I’m talking to right now in that group of ‘we’,” which I think is a socially very handy thing to have.

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, it’s the difference between “We’re going to the movies, are you ready yet?” and “We’re going to the movies. See you later.”

Lauren: As someone who is incredibly incapable of reading social interactions very well, I think this kind of thing in English would be so handy to know if you’re included in the trip to drinks after work, or if you’re included in the meeting or something like that.

Gretchen: It’s a really useful distinction, this inclusive and exclusive “we.” English doesn’t have it. That’s one of the things I wish English had. That’s a fun one. And English is gradually working on trying to figure out a plural “you” form. We’ve got a bunch of different dialects, but not a standard one for writing. That’s a massive lack because you wanna be able to distinguish between “Are you coming?” and “Are all of you coming?” because you get who’s invited. Oh, and another distinction that gets made with second person pronouns is you can make a lot of politeness distinctions in second person. You can say “you” informal, “you” formal. I speak French, and French makes the distinction between “tu” and “vous,” where “tu” is informal and also singular, and “vous” can be either singular or plural, but when it’s singular, it’s formal. I find, actually, the weird thing about this is I get annoyed because I don’t have an equivalent of “you all.” I don’t have a way of being unambiguously plural. Because sometimes if I go to a store, and I wanna say, “Do you guys have any bananas” or something, and I don’t wanna imply –

Lauren: “As opposed to you, specific cashier, do you have any bananas with you right now?”

Gretchen: Yeah, I don’t wanna put them on the spot. Like, it’s not your fault if you’re out of bananas. That’s the store manager’s fault or something. It’s weird to me that I don’t have an unambiguously plural pronoun, but I do instead have to navigate this politeness distinction, particularly when you’re dealing with strangers that you meet in public. You don’t have any frame of reference to know anything about them already. Do you use the “tu” or the “vous”? It kind of depends on their age, and whether it seems like you’re peers, or they’re an older person, you wanna respect them, or something like that.

Lauren: As an English native speaker, so growing up with a language that doesn’t have any kind of politeness distinction like that – and growing up in Australia, which is stereotypically famous for its lack of any kind of formal register, even though that’s not entirely true – but this distinction in formality really made me anxious – and you hear this a lot from English speakers when they learn languages with these pronoun difference distinctions – it really stresses them out as to which one is appropriate. I started learning Nepali, which has not only two, it has three different politeness distinctions. It has the formal polite pronoun, and then it has the one that you can use with people who you’re close to, and then it has one that is for – it’s for children and dogs. My Nepali teacher just didn’t even teach me that one. She’s like, “As a foreigner, there is no social situation in which that one is gonna be appropriately useful for you,” and so, trying to navigate when which one is appropriate – it can feel a bit stressful.

Gretchen: I mean, I get it because I learned France French, but now I live in Quebec. But in France French, they use “vous” a lot more than in Quebec French. In Quebec French, to a stranger in public, you’re a lot more likely to say “tu,” whereas in Franch French, you’re more likely to say “vous.” I know I’m too formal for some people. They’ll “vous” me back, but they don’t really think they should be needing to.

Lauren: Right, yeah. There’s this thing that like, maybe being polite is the best default thing to do, but then in some social situations, it actually pushes people away and makes it –

Gretchen: And being polite can create this social distance. There’re some languages where using words like “please” and “thank you” or polite forms to ask someone to pass you the beans or whatever is actually ruder if you say it to a family member because you shouldn’t have to be polite to a family member. That’s a sign of social distance between you. Politeness pronouns are a very complicated thing.

Lauren: They’re complicated for native speakers. There’s an article in the latest edition of Language, which is a scholarly journal, and it looks at pronouns in Spanish. Spanish has a very similar distinction to that in French where it has a formal and informal register. This work was done by Chase Wesley Raymond, who’s at the University of Colorado. This was a massive corpus study. There’re over a thousand speakers in the corpus and hundreds of hours of recorded conversations between different people in different contexts. This study demonstrated – you know, people who speak these languages probably have these feelings anyway – but this study demonstrated that when people use polite or the formal or informal pronouns, these aren’t fixed. There’s no clear rule that you can put in a textbook to learn. It’s that these things are negotiated, and they can change, and people can shift to being informal to throw someone off, or they can become more formal because they’re in the workspace, whereas they might be less formal if they’re hanging out with this person in some other context. Even for native speakers there’s not always a fixed rule – “Oh, this person is my superior, so I will always use the polite form” or something like that.

Gretchen: I think that was one of the things that surprised me is I found that sometimes I would use the pronouns inconsistently. I thought that I was doing something wrong as a non-native speaker of French that I was using “vous” and “tu” with the same person sometimes, and yet it turns out that that’s something a lot of people do to try to negotiate that. Because the textbook gives you like, okay, we have to have this dialogue where we officially say, “Shall we now ‘tu’ each other?” That’s not a dialogue I’ve actually had very often. People often figure it out. It’s an important question. Let’s move on to third person pronouns because there’s also a lot of interesting stuff that goes on with them. One thing that happens with third person pronouns is what I have called in a blog post the “gay fanfiction problem.”

Lauren: That very serious linguistic problem.

Gretchen: It’s a very serious linguistic problem that happens when you have a narrative with multiple people using the same pronoun, and you have to figure out how – “He touched his hand” – who’s touching whose hand or other parts of the body?

Lauren: Yeah. Especially when this has been going on for multiple paragraphs.

Gretchen: For pages and pages and pages. You don’t wanna necessarily keep repeating their names. You often get people using epithets, you know, like “the taller one” or “the shorter one,” but then it’s not always clear which character is actually taller and which character is shorter. You have to then go remember who’s taller or who’s younger or which one is blond or something like that if you wanna use descriptions of them. To try to figure out “How do we track multiple people when we’re telling a story with people, and we wanna have the efficiency gain of using pronouns, but” –

Lauren: “Everyone’s a ‘he’ or everyone’s a ‘she’.”

Gretchen: Yeah. One of the things people ask about pronouns sometimes is “Why do we have gender in pronouns?” One of the reasons is that it’s a rough and ready way of kind of trying to divide the population into two equal groups. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than some of our other options like dividing people into groups of “tall and short people” or “young and old people” or something like that. It kind of works in a lot of situations that statistically some people in a group will be male and some people in a group will be female. It’s not the straight fanfiction problem because those ones you do have pronouns to tell apart.

Lauren: If there’re only two people in an interaction.

Gretchen: Well, so there’s two problems, right. There’s the gay fanfiction problem and then there’s the “orgy fanfiction problem” – I’m sorry, the “poly fanfiction problem.” Those are two separate problems.

Lauren: But when they collide, it’s very complicated.

Gretchen: When they collide, it’s even worse, yeah. There’s the “gay poly fanfiction problem.”

Lauren: Not all languages have this problem for their gay fanfiction.

Gretchen: I don’t know if all languages write gay fanfiction, but they presumably all tell stories where multiple people are involved. Lauren, you have an interesting example of this not happening.

Lauren: One example is where you have two different – maybe “he” or “she” or “they” – but you have two different versions of “they.” One that you use for one referent, and one you use for a referent that has already been discussed. The fancy word for this is “logophoric pronouns.” But essentially what logophoric pronouns can do is solve the – when you say something like, “He said that he is going to cook a barbeque for us on the weekend.” In isolation, or in an ongoing context, if you’re talking about “Bob” and “Dave,” you could say, “Bob said that Dave’s gonna cook barbeque on the weekend” or “Bob said that Bob himself will cook a barbeque on the weekend.” But if you’re just using pronouns, “He said that he’s gonna cook a barbeque on the weekend,” you don’t actually know if “he” is the person that will do the cooking or if he’s assigning someone else that promise. Logophoric pronouns are like, “He, the person who is that ‘he,’ will cook a barbeque” or “He said that some other ‘him’ will cook the barbeque.”

Gretchen: You have different pronouns for referring back to the person who was already speaking versus referring to a different person from the one who was speaking.

Lauren: I think it would solve the “He put his hands on his hips” problem where it would become clear if someone’s putting his hands on his own hips or on some other dude’s hips.

Gretchen: I dunno if that solves that problem. It solves the “He said that he loved him” problem.

Lauren: Ah, yeah.

Gretchen: But I don’t know – well, I guess, in that case. Or you know, “He said that he wanted to come over” or something. I don’t actually speak a language with logophors, so I don’t know if you can do it with “He put his hands on his hips.”

Lauren: To be honest, I don’t know these languages well enough to make that promise – to be honest.

Gretchen: What I was gonna say is that one thing that I know does solve this problem, which is not logophors, is a different phenomenon which is known as “obviation.” That’s a phenomenon where your pronouns, instead of having gender, they track how important someone is to the discourse. Basically, you have the more important or the more central person gets one pronoun, and the less important or less central, less focal person or persons get a different pronoun.

Lauren: Oh, I could see that being handy.

Gretchen: Sometimes, this is called “third person” and “fourth person” in the sense that if you have a scenario with multiple people in it, the third person is obviously more important or more central somehow than the fourth person. This is, of course, a storytelling device. You can decide as the storyteller who is more important to your story. There’s no gender involved, so either it’s “Third person put third person’s hands on fourth person’s hips” or “Third person put third person’s hands on third person’s hips.” You can track who’s who along that situation. That allows you to very easily keep track of two different persons. The way you introduce them is when you first say their names or you first say the noun or something that’s associated with them that the pronouns are gonna have to refer to is you put a little marker on the names, like a suffix, that indicates that this one is gonna be your third person one or this one is gonna be your fourth person one. Then afterwards you can just refer back to them with that. It’s very interesting from a storytelling perspective because then you can retell the story the same way if you just swap which one is obviative, which one is fourth person, then the story gets a completely different focus. It’s kind of interesting.

Lauren: Cool.

Gretchen: Obviation does a great job of solving the gay fanfiction problem. It doesn’t do a whole lot to solve the poly fanfiction problem because generally you have a third person and a fourth person, and so if you end up with four or five people in a scenario, that’s not –

Lauren: There’s not enough pronouns to go around.

Gretchen: Some languages have a more obscure pronoun known as the “further obviative,” which is like a person, so you can have three people of various levels of importance in a scenario. But I haven’t seen it used a whole lot because, I guess, making this distinction two ways is enough for a lot of languages.

Lauren: Of course, there’re a set of languages where none of this is a problem at all, and they are sign languages that use spatial locations for pronominal reference. In sign languages, generally what happens is, to make the equivalent of a pronoun in a language like English, they’ll sign someone’s name or a reference to someone or their actions in a particular space, and then that space will be used to call back to that person throughout the interaction. Or the person can move around in the signing space, but they’re always able to be spatially referred to.

Gretchen: So, signing space could be like top left or towards the right of the person who’s signing or something like that?

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, when you speak English, and you gesture across a narrative, you’re possibly doing this without really thinking about it anyway. You may be referring to – who are my barbequers again – Bob and Dave.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: Bob and Dave might get to referred to one – you know, Bob’s on the left, Dave’s on the right, and I keep referring to them and gesturing throughout the interaction. But in sign languages like Auslan, which is the one I know this type of example from best, Bob will get put in a particular space, and he’ll be signed there, and then he’ll keep being called back to from there.

Gretchen: If the barbeque is to the left of us, and Bob’s by the barbeque, then we set up the barbeque on the left. We set up Bob near the barbeque. And then we have Dave by the house on the right or something like that.

Lauren: Yeah. If Bob says something, I’ll sign what Bob said in the left-hand space.

Gretchen: Or turn your body towards that space as if you’re speaking from Bob’s perspective. I don’t know much ASL, but I’ve seen people talk about this in ASL as well.

Lauren: It’s a very elegant solution.

Gretchen: It’s beautiful. The nice thing about it is you’re not limited to just having people on the left or people on the right because you have someone that’s top left or bottom left, top right, bottom right.

Lauren: I don’t know what the maximal number – I guess it’s however many people can keep track of in the narrative.

Gretchen: I feel like I’ve heard someone say seven, but that might be false.

Lauren: A good storyteller, surely.

Gretchen: Yeah, if you’re a really good storyteller, you can keep track – just kind of fan them out around your face. But definitely you can more than two, which is fantastic, and it doesn’t matter anything about their gender because you can just set them up wherever they want.

Lauren: Gender doesn’t matter. Number doesn’t matter. All of those kind of things.

Gretchen: Sign languages have solved the gay fanfiction orgy problem. All other languages will have to figure out how to do that.

Lauren: Playing catch up, really.

Gretchen: Or just learn a sign language so that you can write better fanfiction. That’s a good reason.

Lauren: Obviously.

Gretchen: The clear and obvious solution. We talked about language typology systems, but another thing that comes up in English and other languages is the idea of a gender-neutral pronoun, especially in the third person.

Lauren: We are technically unable to do this podcast on pronouns without mentioning English singular “they.” It would be a crime.

Gretchen: Because it’s the one that keeps making the headlines.

Lauren: It’s been very popular. It was Word of the Year for the American Dialect Society last year in 2015.

Gretchen: Yes, it was. I was there that vote. We were pretty excited about it.

Lauren: Did you vote for singular “they”?

Gretchen: Yes, of course I did. I actually wrote a whole article nominating it for Word of the Year.

Lauren: What even is singular “they”?

Gretchen: Singular “they” is the use of “they” which is *traditionally thought of as – and I’m gonna put a larger asterisk beside this because I’m gonna get back to that – as a plural third person pronoun as a singular pronoun. It is not a new thing in English. I wanna go back to that asterisk by “traditionally” because using “they” in a singular form is actually very, very old. This is examples like if you say, “Someone left their umbrella,” and you don’t know whose umbrella it is, but generally, people don’t share in joint ownership of umbrellas probably.

Lauren: Not in this day and age of affordable umbrellas. When you say it’s not recent, it’s like, Jane Austin used singular “they” in this context. Shakespeare used singular “they” in this context.

Gretchen: Chaucer used singular “they.” It goes all the way back to Old English. In fact, singular “they” is only about 100 years younger than singular “you.” If you remember when we started losing “thou.”

Lauren: Ah, yeah, I remember that. Back in the day.

Gretchen: I know. Just get in your time travel box and go back to when people started using “you” for singular, then jump forward about 100 years, and you’ll hear people starting to use “they” as singular. In fact, I dunno, maybe they were using it earlier, this is just when we have written records.

Lauren: Prove it to us with an example.

Gretchen: This is gonna be me badly pronouncing Middle English because I am not an English historian. This is from Chaucer “The Pardoner’s Prologue” around 1395 which goes, “And whoso fyndeth hym out of switch blame, they wol come up…” This mean approximately, “And whoever finds him” – whatever “out of switch blame” means – “they will come up.” This “whoever” is a nonspecific singular person, and you can tell it’s singular because it’s using the conjugation “fyndeth,” and then “they” is being used to refer back to “whoso.” Here’s one from 1489 which goes, “Each of them should make themself ready.” That was an example of singular “themself” from Caxton.

Lauren: He is also old.

Gretchen: He’s also very old. Here’s the Shakespeare example which goes, “There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me as if I were their well-acquainted friend.” That’s from A Comedy of Errors in 1594.

Lauren: Shakespeare said it – must be legit.

Gretchen: Shakespeare said it – must be legit.

Lauren: This is not a new and exciting thing. Why the hell was it Word of the Year last year?

Gretchen: Why talk about it as if it’s something new? Well, for one reason, a Word of the Year doesn’t have to be brand new. It’s generally newly prominent. People are talking about it more. When you looked at what types of words people were talking about, singular “they” showed up in there. I did a Google Ngram search that showed that people were searching for it more. There was a meeting of the American Copy Editors Society, which Ben Zimmer was at and reported on, people talking about singular “they” a lot there. A lot of people read Ben Zimmer’s article about the copyeditor’s meeting, and it’s like, “Ah, well, that’s interesting.” There was a lot of talking about singular “they.” What a lot of people were talking about with singular “they” was not just this non-specific usage, the stuff like, “Each of them should make themself ready” or “And whoever finds him, they should come,” it’s this specific usage for a particular person, which is also not completely new but not as old as Shakespeare.

Lauren: Right. So, older examples, it’s talking about “they” as in it could be anyone, whereas now it’s about a specific person in the way that “you” is about a specific person – or “he” or “she.”

Gretchen: It’s about a specific person. In the way that I prefer people refer to me as with the pronouns “she” and “her” when they’re talking about me in the second person, some people say, “Could you please refer to me using the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘them’ when you’re talking about me in the third person?” That’s something that’s a newer phenomenon, referring to someone as “they” as a specific person. So, if you say something like, “Alex looked at themself in the mirror,” and so you have singular “they” there. Because the thing is, for the nonspecific kind of singular “they,” you can often kind of find a way to write around it if you’re not a fan. You can recast sentences in the plural, or you can use a passive, or you can do various things to try to get rid of that “they” if you’re really determined that it can only be singular. For an individual person who says, “Please refer to me as ‘they’,” the way to get around that is kind of our gay fanfiction problem where you have to refer to them by their name every single time.

Lauren: That’s just creepy.

Gretchen: It’s just creepy. It gets really weird-sounding really quickly.

Lauren: I mean, unless that’s a person’s preference, and then as well as you can deal with the cognitive load of that, fair enough.

Gretchen: It is definitely a lot more difficult if you don’t have any pronouns at all to refer to someone. Singular “they” as an individual pronoun for a specific person is a phenomenon that people have been advocating for a lot more recently, and it’s gotten a lot more visibility. Then that becomes kind of “Well, if you’re gonna accept singular ‘they’ to refer to a specific person, why not let the non-specific use in by the backdoor while we’re at it?”

Lauren: It’s a much easier way to just – you’re just pushing a little in the paradigm and creating a little space that people are increasingly finding is necessary. It may feel a bit weird now, and I know some people really struggle to find it grammatically acceptable, but I think over time, it will normalise. A good example of the likelihood of that is from Sweden. Sweden has a “she” and “he” equivalent – it’s “hon” and “han.” I am definitely not saying those right. Sorry, Swedish people. But now Swedish speakers have officially had the option of using a gender-neutral form “hen.” “Officially” as in it’s now in all government documents and anything where it doesn’t need to refer to someone specifically as male or female, the form “hen” can now be used.

Gretchen: We know that even if the current generation of speakers have a bit of difficulty with it, if you expose kids to something, it’s something they can learn. Gender neutral pronouns are a thing that many languages have, and so there’s no reason why kids can’t learn that in English as well, even if it’s a bit harder for an adult. Adults can learn whole new languages. It takes an effort, but you can learn a new language. Learning some new pronouns for a given language, yeah, takes some effort, but it’s not impossible.

Lauren: No, my feeling is if someone wants to be called by whatever pronouns they want to, they’ve generally gone through a lot more massive process in their life to come to that decision and feel comfortable with sharing it with people than I have to go through to change a very tiny part of my linguistic behaviour.

Gretchen: I feel like it hurts the other person more for me not to use their correct pronouns than it does for me to figure out how to use those myself. Yeah, so singular “they” is one of the most visible of these gender-neutral third person pronouns for English because it has this non-specific use that’s been going on for a long time, but there is also a whole set of other not specific third person pronouns that are used in English.

Lauren: People have come up with other suggestions to fill the paradigm but not mean that we have the same problem that we have with “you” where it can be singular or plural.

Gretchen: There’s a whole bunch of those. They actually go back to the 1850s.

Lauren: Really? I didn’t know they were that old.

Gretchen: The earlier usage insofar as there are records of it – because I haven’t been able to find ones on the nonbinary activism side but maybe they exist. But the ones that I have records of are grammarians saying, “Well, gosh, we can’t deal with this plural pronoun being used for the singular, so let’s invent one for the singular because clearly it’s necessary to have a non-gender alternative for the singular.” They’re approaching it – at least the records that I’m aware of are approaching it from a grammatical perspective initially.

Lauren: I love that.

Gretchen: The term is “epicene pronoun.” It goes way back.

Lauren: There you go. Do you know what the original candidate suggestion was or what the suggestions were?

Gretchen: There’s this lovely website from Dennis Baron at the University of Illinois. He has a chronology of early nonbinary pronouns. Oh, wow, sorry. The earliest example is from 1792 that he has. This is the Scottish economist and philosopher James Anderson who writes an article arguing for the usefulness of an indeterminate pronoun like the pronoun “ou” recently reported in provincial use. Then Dennis Baron goes on to say that, in fact, Anderson went overboard suggesting that English would benefit from 13 genders – [laughter] –

Lauren: [Groans]

Gretchen: – including two indefinite or common gender pronouns.

Lauren: He’s trying to solve the poly gay fanfiction orgy scenario.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah, wow, this is really interesting. I’m just looking at this list.

Lauren: This is what happens when you do research while reading it out loud, Gretchen.

Gretchen: The internet is beautiful. If you look at his list, he has to denote “male animals alone; female animals alone; inanimate objects alone; animate objects which either express a general class or a whole genus or where it is not necessary to specify sex at all; animals known to be castrated and meant to be distinguished as such; male and females known to be such though not meant to be separated” – this is what he calls the “matrimonial gender,” he’s not gay enough – “males only; part perfect and part castrated” – oh, “perfect” being “non-castrated.” That’s an interesting terminology. “Females and castrata; males, females, and castrata; males and inanimates conjoined; females and inanimates conjoined; males, females, and inanimates conjoined” – these are not natural genders.

Lauren: I am tired.

Gretchen: [Laughs] “Males, females, and inanimates either separated or conjoined where no distinction of gender was to be averted to in any way. This is precisely the power of the present pronoun ‘they’.” That’s finally his 13th gender pronoun.

Lauren: Phew. I’ve forgotten the first one now.

Gretchen: Yeah. Thirteen genders – probably not necessary. But this is a proposal from 1792. Then just two years later, there’s another article providing a critique, explanation, and defence of singular “they,” and another call for the coining of a common gender pronoun.

Lauren: There we go.

Gretchen: And then we have 1808, someone suggesting that we use “it” for a gender neutral pronoun.

Lauren: I think “xe” and “xer” is the one I know of that had the most traction.

Gretchen: “Xe” and “xer” is one of the best-known ones. It does not show up in the early list. There’s a whole bunch of early proposals for gender neutral pronouns, and we’ll include a link to this fantastic page about them, but the best-known one at the moment, I think, is “xe/xer,” which is spelled a couple different ways. There’s X-E, X-I-R, X-I-E, X-E-R – couple different options there. Oh, some people spell it with a Z as well – Z-I-E or Z-E. But as far as I know, people generally pronounce the X one also as /zi/.

Lauren: English pronouns have been changing as long as there has been English, and they’ll continue to change whether that’s the inclusion of singular “they” or “xe” becoming more popular. Maybe we’ll finally go back to having a plural “you” form that everyone agrees on.

Gretchen: I think we’re on our way to a “you” form but, you know, definitely haven’t gotten there. Maybe if we have singular “they,” then we’ll end up with “they all” or “th’all” like “you all” and “ya’ll.”

Lauren: “Theys.”

Gretchen: “Theys.”

Lauren: “Thins.”

Gretchen: “Thins.” “They guys” does not work for me. I guess you could have “those guys,” but then you run into a gender problem, so probably I don’t support that one, but “th’all,” I dunno, I could get my head around that. Because then you have this nice “ya’ll/th’all” paradigm.

Lauren: Yeah, I like it.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: There we go. We’ve solved English for you.

Gretchen: We’ve solved it. Now, we just need to make everyone else do the thing which, as we’ve seen, is always a challenge.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to various things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, or other podcast places. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and other social networks. I can be found @GretchenAMcC on Twitter and my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com.

Lauren: I can be found on Twitter as Superlinguo. I also blog at superlinguo.com. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our music is by The Triangles. Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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This transcript was redone in 2024.