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Conclusions

What I’ve learned most from this brief, very non-scientific experiment, is that we all use singular their all the time in casual speech.My data pool was comprised mostly of speakers that I see on a daily basis- coworkers, friends, and classmates, most of whom are white females. If I were to do this experiment again, I would increase the diversity of the participants. 

I found that men were slightly more likely than women to use ‘he’ as a default pronoun, but the only instances I found were used by male professors,speaking in a formal register. There was no difference in the use of singular their based on the race of the speaker. ‘He or she’ was only used in very formal registers. I actually only found written instances, no spoken ones for ‘he or she’. It was also only used by older writers, suggesting that its falling out of use except in very formal situations. ‘It’ as a gender neutral pronoun I found used twice for dogs, and once when the speaker was referring to a baby. All demographics used the singular they much more frequently than any other pronouns. 

In conclusion, there is no linguistic reason that singular they isn’t a valid form. We use it all the time, in many different contexts. Personally, I believe that we should respect everyone’s choice regarding the pronouns they wish to use. I would urge those who argue that linguistic purity should come before the right of every individual to chose what they are called, to not confuse language change with language decay. Instead of White’s racist outrage that we must use ‘logical grammar’, today we have trans-phobic  allegations that reinforce the gender binary. Singular they has been used for centuries, and is still used frequently today, regardless of the gender of the antecedent- its only recently become an issue due to due to use by the trans community. Its important to remember that singular they has always been and still is a valid form. There has never been any good reason to call it ‘bad English’. So go ahead and call your friends by their preferred pronouns- you aren’t breaking any grammar rules. 

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When Do We Use Singular They?

It turns out, we use singular they all the time. Its crazy, actually, how much we use it. Before I started this project, I assumed that singular they would be used mostly when the gender of the antecedent was unknown. For example, “Look, someone left their umbrella here”. It turns out though, that we use singular they even when we do know the gender of the antecedent, but it isn’t linguistically apparent. For instance, one of the sample sentences I’ve collected is, “Yeah, my friend is coming, but I don’t know when they’ll get here”. The speaker obviously knows the gender of their friend, but since the word ‘friend’ is gender-neutral, using singular they sounds natural. I already have many instances of singular they being used with words, like ‘everyone’, ‘someone’, and ‘whoever’, but I’ve also found several instances with words like ‘neighbor’, ‘landlord’ and ‘classmate’. It was also interesting to me that the singular they occurred frequently in hypothetical sentences. For example, I was at work discussing whether or not it would be ethical to get a sugar daddy and drop out with my friend Sam. (Judge me if you want, but I think it’s a conversation we’ve all had at some point). Sam said,referring to his hypothetical sugar daddy, “Yeah, I guess, if they’re not like, too old or anything”. Its another interesting that, even though the gender of the antecedent was known, Sam still used the singular they. One of my other friends likes to complain about her boyfriend, but she also often uses a hypothetical sentence structure. For example, “So like, if your boyfriend wanted you to come over to their house after...would you go?” Even though we know we’re talking about a person who identifies as male. Turns out, we use singular they when the gender of the antecedent is ambiguous, and also when the sentence is phrased hypothetically.

Important note- I’m not counting uses of singular their for non-binary individuals for this project. First of all, I have a quite a few non-binary friends, so counting that data would skew the results. Furthermore, by the end of this project, I want to be able to point out that resisting the use of the singular they (or any other pronoun) for non-binary individuals on the basis of linguistic integrity is a completely invalid excuse, because we already use the singular they in almost every other context. 

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Are We Finally Getting To The Social Experiment Part Yet?

Much as I love researching (mostly) pointless linguistic trivia, I do want to do some actual research into why we seem to hate the singular they so much. As much as it’s been condemned by grammarians, it’s still very commonly used. I got the idea for this project one day while I was at work. One of my coworkers, Theresa,corrected one of my other coworkers when they used the singular they(look, I used the singular they in this sentence...and my keyboard didn’t burst into flames or anything!). The instance struck me as interesting, because Theresa, a black woman, speaks AAVE, a dialect of English that has been, and still is, discriminated against. It seemed odd to me that a person who most likely has faced some type of linguistic discrimination would have such a strong reaction to a stigmatized form. It left me with a few questions- What linguistic contexts do we use singular they in? What genders use singular them most often? Which dialects? Are young people more likely to use singular they? 

To answer these questions, for the next few weeks, I’ll be collecting instances of singular they and recording information about the context in which it was used. 

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When did the singular they become stigmatized?

The use of the singular they traces its way back to Shakespeare, but remains stigmatized in modern day speech. How did this discrimination start? To answer this question, we have to go aaaaall the way back to when we first started caring about how people talk and why.

To do this, its necessary to know the difference between prescriptivism and descriptivism. Descriptivism, like the word sounds, describes the way that normal people speak their language, errors and all. Prescriptivism, on the other hand, tries to impose rules on speakers, the most well-know rule perhaps being, “Don’t split your infinitives!”. Surprisingly, prescriptivism really only arose during the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. Before then,the way people spoke was considered correct simply because it was the way people spoke. The idea of sending children to school to learn how to speak a language they already spoke would have been ridiculous. Instead, educated children were taught Latin.  

The change towards prescriptivism surprisingly wasn’t motivated from above. In other words, it didn’t come from stuffy, monocled,Latin-obsessed, eighteenth-century grammarians hastily typing out arbitrary language rules in their elegant studies. Instead, the idea of ‘proper English’ was really a grassroots movement. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was also the start of the industrial revolution in Britain. The emergence of new jobs and industries created a new social class- no longer peasants, but not aristocracy either. The newly- created middle class certainly had more advantages than their fore bearers,but they had one problem- crippling anxiety. The new middle class had no idea which fork to use during the salad course, or which glass was for wine and which for  champagne. Worse, they didn’t know how to talk like the aristocracy. It was around this time that style- guides and handbooks became popular, and well as the first time that Miss-Manners style letters began to be written. The middle class requested linguistic guidance, and they got what they asked for. Samuel Richardson, author of Pamela, wrote a series of templates for letters that could be adapted to any social situation- anything from recommending a wet nurse to a friend to chastising your nephew for hanging around with a bad crowd. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe wrote a guide directed to tradesmen carrying out correspondence in a professional setting for the first time. 

From that time forward, prescriptivism  only became more prevalent and less tolerant. Richard Grant White, born in 1822, dedicated his life to studying Shakespeare and writing books on the English language. As a stereotypical 18th century grammarian, he had many linguistic pet peeves, but one of his most hated so-called errors, was the use of what he called ‘illogical language’. This meant that English forms like a double negative, which has been used since before English was recognizable as English, were out. Another illogical form, according to White, is the word, “reliable”, which really should be “rely-upon-able”, since you don’t rely something, you rely upon it.In addition to being extremely fun at parties, Richard Grant White was also pretty racist. He believed that good grammar was common sense, and wrote, “This faculty exists in a greater degree in some races than in others. The Anglo-Saxon race are distinguished by it; they are preeminently a people of common sense”  Unfortunately,White wasn’t the only academic at the time to hold similar views- and since singular they was considered an illogical form, it has been considered taboo in academic use ever since. 

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What’s so wrong with the singular they anyway?

Hi everybody! I’m a linguistics major, and in this blog I thought I’d explore some of the misconceptions we have about language. It seems that one of the most despised errors that English speakers can make is using the ‘singular they’.  In other words, using a plural pronoun to refer to a singular antecedent. For example, “Jane left their book at my house”.  A quick Google search led to a myriad of articles decrying its use, one quote in particular calling the prolific usage of the word, “Like flies around a bowl of rotten bananas”. Oftentimes, millennials get blamed for destroying the integrity of English (although that’s just the tip of the iceberg considering all of the things we supposedly destroyed). Style-books and dictionaries for years have condemned the use of the singular they for years, but never offered a workable solution. Using ‘he’ as a gender neutral pronoun was recommended in The Elements of Style, in 1979, “The use of he as pronoun for nouns embracing both genders is a simple, practical convention rooted in the beginnings of the English language”. Recently, though,the patriarchal use of default masculine pronouns is falling out a use. In 2005, A Students’ Intro to English Grammar wrote, “The real problem with using he is that it unquestionably colours the interpretation, sometimes inappropriately... he doesn't have a genuinely sex-neutral sense”. It seems that the future of singular they is looking up. In 2017 that The Associated Press Stylebook allowed the use of singular they, although they added the disclaimer, “rewording is usually possible, and always preferable”. In 2015 the Washington Post Style Manual endorsed the use of singular they to refer to gender-nonconforming people.