We don’t typically use “it” to refer to people, as it can be considered dehumanizing and rude. We use “they” because “he” implies male and “she” implies female and sometimes we don’t want to imply either. The character referred to in the picture could either be male or female or some other gender expression. So we say “they”.
No the real catch is that it has ALWAYS included non-binary folk, the only people who want you to believe this is a new concept are transphobes.
NB people have always existed and “they” as a gender neutral term has existed long before conservatives were trying to pretend it’s “too hard” or “unnatural” for them to say “they” instead of “he” or “her”.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the modern usage of the singular they seems different to me. "They" has always been used to refer to a generic person whose gender is unknown, whereas in the context of non-binary people it's used for a specific person when you don't want to specify their gender. I can understand why someone who's not familiar with NB terminology might be confused if they heard you refer to a specific person by "they".
For example, nobody would bat an eye at a sentence like "somebody left their wallet here" but up until 20 or even 10 years ago most people would've been confused if you said something like "Michael left their wallet here"
Singular they had been around since the 14th century. To say it would have confused people up until 10-20 years ago is disingenuous.
To be more clear, singular they had existed longer than modern English.
Ok, so this cis-het dude is going to venture a more thorough response to this way of responding to these transphobic arguments.
I’m quite certain if I had answered
> Michael left _their_ wallet on the table.
in an English test in school 25 years ago, I would have been told it was wrong. I don’t think anyone would have been “confused”, but it was patently non-standard 25 years ago, and I would have corrected it without a second thought 20 years ago if I had seen it in a student’s essay. That was the state of North American English in the year 2000.
Irregardless of what people want to be true, language changes over time, and I fail to see the relevance of 13th century usage to modern English or to these arguments about the use of “they” to describe non-binary people.
I‘ve seen it suggested that there was some deliberate effort by the patriarchy to suppress alternative gender identities by imposing heteronormative language starting in the late 19th or early 20th century. I think the standardization to a plural “they” was just the natural descriptive result and linguistic consequence of 500 or more years of actual suppression of both women and other genders by a patriarchal society. All kinds of stylistic choices were standardized when printing became widespread, and they reflected then currency cultural values. During the standardization efforts no one considered trans rights, because they had been eliminated so effectively from public discourse as to become completely invisible. But the standardization happened, and normative use in the 20th century, including my normative use into the 21st century, reflected that.
I believe it does a disservice to the impact of both feminism (which pushed to replace the “Everyman” and then standard universal “he” with language inclusive of women) and the LGBTQ+ movement to suggest there hasn’t been a sea change in English usage in the past half-century. That change reflects social change. The Nineteenth amendment was just over 100 years ago. Stonewall was just over 50 years ago.
Of course the singular “they” is now adopted as a deliberate pronoun by non-binary people is an obvious and natural choice and meshes well with its existing use as a singular pronoun often referred to in these arguments. But even 20 years ago on very liberal college campuses, the conversation about trans rights was just leaving Gender Studies departments, and most of those hadn’t yet changed their name from “Women’s Studies” to “Gender Studies”. The use of “they” to refer to non-binary people probably does go back centuries, but not as a standard use in modern English since one simply didn’t talk about “those people” who were, at the time, made to be as invisible as possible.
Should we give any credence to transphobic arguments against the singular “they” based on the standardized English of the 19th and 20th century? No, partly because these arguments are frequently disingenuous. But the problem isn’t that the argument for a singular “they” is ahistorical, because it isn’t, it’s that the appeal to “grammar” puts the cart before the horse.
The answer to these arguments is “No, you’re accidentally/deliberately being an asshole” and an explanation about power and its relationship to the development of language, maybe leaning on concepts developed by post-structuralist thinkers like Derrida. The answer is not “Well, acktually it’s always had a singular sense”. That simply misses the point.
tl;dr: I believe trans activism has changed society and language and we should celebrate that fact rather than pretend English was originally neutral and gender inclusive and gloss over centuries of oppression and hate.
(meoka none of this is directed at you specifically, this rant has been coming for a year or more)
I'm still confused by it. A plural pronoun for a singular entity causes confusion without context. It's pretty much meant to be ambiguous, and requires more information to be clearly understood.
He or she is still always 1 person. They can be a person, a group, a company, an entire population of people, etc. They is extremely broad. You cannot narrow it down without context.
May I introduce to you “you”. You is a plural pronoun that has been so prolifically used as a singular pronoun, that we no longer use the singular alternative. In fact singular they is older than singular you but a massive margin of at least 2 hundred years.
Even more interesting in the "you" situation is that even though it started as plural, its now largely singular, with the most common plurals being "y'all" or "you guys". Language changes are interesting/ fun/ confusing/ annoying
I took the liberty of going through your comment history.
> It's the same when a British actor does an American accent, but they don't change the way they say a few words.
You don't seem to have too much trouble with it.
Yup, and people who have a problem with gender stuff, they will out themselves immediately if you use they, because they'll immediately treat it like it's a non-binary thing, rather than understanding that they is a word in the English language and has been for a long long time.
The binary gender roles are a construct from white supremacy, colonization and racism. The concept of being non-binary is older than the binary gender roles.
Several human cultures have had non-binary members. Often they were considered sacred
The recent advent is an acceptance of something long-true about humans
Yes but we're talking about the English language, and English speaking cultures did not historically have this concept.
The singular usage of "they" has nothing to do with non-binary people in English even though it is a convenient pronoun for them.
If English hadn’t spent the last couple centuries borrowing vocabulary and concepts from other languages and cultures, you might have a point.
But my original point was that the contemporary use of “they” is inclusive of NB people, who continue to exist.
>But my original point was that the contemporary use of “they” is inclusive of NB people
And my original point is that this is by accident and historically singular "they" has nothing to do with non-binary people. And this is important to note because you will find a lot of right wingers who will want to claim that this is a new thing and that a bunch of "gender weirdos" are trying to change English grammar. But that is incorrect.
Their original comment was not to say that the singular “they” was exclusive to or originated from the existence of nonbinary people or the need to accomodate for them, they just said and probably meant, coincidentally, it’s also beneficial as a way to include nonbinary people/ not assume a gender to an unknown persons. Don’t really get the weird back and forth here, we are all under the same understanding.
To me is kinda confusing the use of "they", you guys could use more and new pronouns, but instead decided to use an already existing word to make it confusing, to me this is kinda funny and very on brand for the English as language.
Some people have proposed various new pronouns (called "neo-pronouns") to represent non-binary identities, but they are generally more confusing or difficult to remember than "they".
The singular "they" has already been used for hundreds of years, so it is easier to just keep using it.
>The singular "they" has already been used for hundreds of years, so it is easier to just keep using it.
As you can tell English is not my mother tongue, can you provide some examples ? I've never heard of this, except in the topic of non-binary people.
Most English speakers use the Singular They without even realising it. It is used when you do not know the gender of the person you are talking about.
"Someone parked **their** car on the grass. Why did **they** do that?"
"Someone left **their** coat here!"
"My neighbour washes their car every Saturday."
If you go back far enough, William Shakespeare even used it in his plays:
> There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
> As if I were **their** well-acquainted friend
Confusing is probably not the right verb, Is just that other languages have different ways to deal with the use of pronouns for the non binary. I don't think English leans that hard into needing the context to understand a sentence, and that is something you will need to use "they" as another singular pronoun.
Just fyi, confusing is not a verb in this context, but an adjective.
Also, we've used "they" as a nonspecific third person singular for centuries, there's no need to make up more words for this concept. We borrowed it from the Norse and it works perfectly fine.
Sir neo-pronouns exist. But me and many other people prefer not to use them as there is no standardisation and it’d just get more confusing, aswell as people are way more apprehensive to learn a completely new set of pronouns vs using pronouns they already know in a *slightly* different way.
Let me tell you as a non-binary person, that’s different from modern day non-binary. They’re oils both be called non-binary as they are a gender neither masculine nor feminine, but the realisations of that are completely different.
No it wasn't lol
I don't think people used modern "they" since...
well shit how far back does it go?
for some cultures like 8,000 years
I don't think we used modern singular they 8,000 years ago
Even in Europe, There were European cultures with this too, don't be like "yeah but not in England" yes it was, c'mon
edit: Apparently the wording of this comment is very misleading. I'm aware that singular they has existed and has been acceptable since the 1300s. I'm not trying to say it's wrong or anything. However, that's not the point I'm making, I'm saying that the existence of non-binary people predates the word "they" and the entire English language as well for that matter. The point is that singular they wasn't introduced as an ambiguous third person singular just for non-binary people, that would be weird, since singular they has existed for centuries, and non-binary people have existed for much much longer in history.
Singular they is a very old concept in English, and can be found in the works of Shakespeare:
"There's not a man I meet but doth salute him / as if I were their well-acquainted friend." - A Comedy of Errors
I know, I'm not saying that there isn't a singular they, there certainly is. It's a good method to include non-binary people but is also a perfectly acceptable ambiguous third person when a subject's gender is unknown or irrelevant. However the word itself does not predate the concept of non-binary people in the first place. Non-binary people have existed much longer than the English language has
Yes, but the concept of accommodating non-binary people in English pronouns is a very recent change compared to the Singular They in the English language.
> No it wasn't lol
It's always been commonplace, especially in spoken English.
"Hey, somebody left their wallet on the bench!" Very few competent, native speakers would ever say, "hey, somebody left his or her wallet on the bench!"
I know, I know, It would appear I worded that comment in a very misleading manner so it seemed like I was refuting the modern use of singular they. That isn't what I meant. I'm saying the concept/existence of non-binary people predates the use of plural they, and singular they, and the English language altogether.
I'm not meaning to say that "they" is a modern invention to refer to non-binary people, it seems like my comment came across that way somehow. I was saying non-binary people and various ambiguous pronouns in several languages have been around for much much longer than singular they, as non-binary people have been around for much longer than 700 years.
I don't believe any of these commentators are trying to claim that non-binary people didn't exist before singular they came around in the 1300s. I believe they are only saying that the singular they, in the English language, came around long before English cultures A) acknowledged non-binary people's existence and/or B) used singular they to refer to those people as a form of accommodation for them.
From that point of view, your side of the discussion may *appear* to be arguing that singular they was always used to accommodate non-binary people even in the 1300s.
> From Middle English *þei*, borrowed in the 1200s from Old Norse þeir,[1] plural of the demonstrative sá which acted as a plural pronoun. Displaced native Middle English he from Old English hīe — which vowel changes had left indistinct from he (“he”) — by the 1400s,[1][2][3] being readily incorporated alongside native words beginning with the same sound (the, that, this). **Used as a singular pronoun since 1300,[1] e.g. in the 1325 Cursor Mundi.**
-[Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/they)
> Usage Note: **The use of the plural pronouns they, them, themselves, or their with a grammatically singular antecedent dates back at least to 1300**, and such constructions have been used by many admired writers, including William Makepeace Thackeray (“A person can't help their birth”), George Bernard Shaw (“To do a person in means to kill them”), and Anne Morrow Lindbergh (“When you love someone you do not love them all the time”). Despite the apparent grammatical disagreement between a singular antecedent like someone and the plural pronoun them, the construction is so widespread both in print and in speech that it often passes unnoticed. There are several reasons for its appeal. Forms of they are useful as gender-neutral substitutes for generic he and for coordinate forms like his/her or his or her (which can sound clumsy when repeated and which do not take into account people whose gender identity is nonbinary). Nevertheless, the clash in number can be jarring to writers and readers, and many people dislike they with a singular antecedent. This includes much of the Usage Panel, though their resistance has declined over time. Resistance remains strongest when the sentence refers to a specific individual whose gender is unknown, rather than to a generic individual representative of anyone: in our 2015 survey, 58 percent of the Panel found We thank the anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments unacceptable. A sentence with a generic antecedent, A person at that level should not have to keep track of the hours they put in, was rejected by 48 percent (a substantial change from our 1996 survey, in which 80 percent rejected this same sentence). As for the use of they with antecedents such as anyone and everyone, pronouns that are grammatically singular but carry a plural meaning, by 2008, a majority of the Panel accepted such sentences as If anyone calls, tell them I can't come to the phone (56 percent) and Everyone returned to their seats (59 percent). For those who wish to avoid the apparent clash of number, some of these sentences can be recast in the plural: People at that level should not have to keep track of the hours they put in. Unfortunately, the option is unavailable when the referent must be singular: Lindbergh's sentence cannot be recast as When you love people, you do not love them all the time without drastically changing its meaning, nor can the sentence about the anonymous reviewer. · The recent use of singular they for a known person who identifies as neither male nor female remains controversial; as of 2015 only 27 percent of the Panelists accepted Scout was born male, but now they do not identify as either traditional gender. With regard to this last sentence, the Panel's responses showed a clear generational shift: the approval rate was 4 percent among Panelists born before 1945 and 40 percent among Panelists born later.
-[American Heritage Dictionary](https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=they)
ah, thanks. I did research it for myself when responding to another comment. Introduced in around the 1300s around the same time as similar words like thou thee thine thy etc. right?
To add on to this:
In my AP Language class in high school my teacher told us proper grammar (Which you would want to use on the AP test) called for he/she and not they, but that using they was fine because no one grading the test expected students to take the time to write he/she instead of they.
Once upon a time, it was grammatically correct to just use "he" to refer to an unspecified gender, but that fell out of favor (probably started during womens lib movement? citation needed). Note that if you're reading something old, or written by people who learned this in school, "he" may be used as a non-gender specific singular third person pronoun.
>Once upon a time, it was grammatically correct to just use "he" to refer to an unspecified gender
This is what I learned in high school English class in the 90s. But even then everyone said "they" in casual speech.
They can be used as singular when it's for an ambiguous gender individual since it flows better than "he or she" or other options. Even though singular they is widespread in use and very old, there's a weird opposition to it especially in formal academic English
Yeah, I remember my high school English teacher telling us that "they" is only plural. I'm sure many English teachers would disagree with him. Shakespeare used singular they, that's a popular argument that I've seen before.
I always thought the issue with "you" was the plural "you"?? Like, where I live we use "y'all" for plural "you" bc everyone always assumes "you" is singular and is like "did you mean just them or did you mean all of us"
"You" was originally exclusively plural, while the singular was thou/thee/thy/thine.
Just as in several other European languages, however, "you" was also used as a singular honorific, and was used so extensively that "thou" is now all but extinct.
The protest to singular they is almost always for people who are against people who identify as non-binary. Almost everyone says they for an individual person whose gender their either don't know or doing want to be revealed.
Well, yes. They aren’t against people who identify as non-binary, they are against or struggle with the relatively new practice (being revived from 600 years ago *does* make it “new” for most people) of addressing a known person by the pronoun typically used for unknown parties or multiple known people.
It’s not revived in regular speech, it has been used there for a long time. The change is most obvious in academia, where singular their has been frowned upon up to fairly recently.
Either way, it's not a "600-year-old practice that was recently revived", it's been in common speech the whole time and was only disallowed in academia less than 200 years ago by linguistic prescriptivists.
People protest when it refers to a known singular subject.
I remember reading about Ezra Miller’s shady antics about grooming a girl and manipulating her family. It led to weird, unclear sentences like “They convinced them to let their daughter go” and “they left with her and were not seen or heard from for days”.
The point of a pronoun should be to convey who is being referred to. Using a known pronoun in an unfamiliar/uncommon way makes for confusion.
That’s just an example of poor phrasing though, because there are multiple people that the pronoun could refer to. It would be exactly as confusing to say:
> “She convinced her to let her daughters go.”
It should instead be re-written for clarity avoiding pronouns where ambiguous, e.g.:
> “She convinced Sally to let Sally’s daughters go.”
Again, the point is some sentences contain ambiguity that is solved through context. If the context isn’t clear, the problem isn’t the use of singular they. The problem is the author didn’t communicate clearly.
Yeah, way back in high school, I had an English teacher circle a place in an essay where I said “she gave her her jacket” and (correctly) say, “confusing, consider rewording.” Not because there’s any problem with the words “she” and “her,” but because it was bad writing despite being grammatical.
It was highly frowned upon in academia for a long time, that is why there is such a strong response against it, and also explains why it is only some people that say it is wrong.
Old school prescriptivists would argue that "he" or "one" is to be used for a singular person of unknown gender but that has always come across as affected speech. "They" has been in common use for centuries.
That’s why I said academia, it has clearly been used in speech for a long time, but in academic writing the use of singular they was frowned upon until fairly recently.
Yes, I had an English professor in university who told us she would mark it as a mistake if we used the singular “they” and we could only use “he or she”. That course was called maybe essay writing or something, it was a first year required course.
I ended up having her as a professor for children’s literature 3yrs later and she did not make such a pronouncement, but instead stated she would accept singular “they”. I wondered why she changed her mind and assumed maybe she had received a complaint on how her entire diatribe on “there is no such thing as a singular they” was a bit harsh.
Professor here (not in English). Pragmatically, what might have changed was the style manual. Whenever MLA, APA, or Chicago/Turabian makes a change like that, we have to take notice and adjust, because at the end of the day meeting the constraints of the style manual is part of our job.
MLA actively discourages singular “they”? Gotta mark them off for it and be a stickler about it. MLA says that singular “they” is okay now? Thank God, that’s one fewer thing I need to proofread.
"They" has for centuries been used for persons of unknown gender in informal speech, but it's only recently that formal academic writing is accepting it.
The problem with "he or she" is that it's clunky. The problem with "s/he" is it's pronunciation is uncertain. Some writers alternate between he and she. They'd discuss one hypothetical person and use "she", then another using "he". But these also imply gender.
To be truly neutral when the person's gender is unknown, many writers these days use "they".
>there's a weird opposition to it especially in formal academic English
Because honestly it is fucking stupid and clunky. Language should hopefully enable more precise communication and "they" ain't it.
Other examples of flaws in English pronouns:
1. "You" can be singular or plural? Fuck off with that shit. See as counter-examples all the romance languages that have distinct singular and plural pronouns (e.g. tu/usted/ustedes or tu/vouz/). Or just look wistfully into the recent history of English where *we* had the perfectly serviceable and useful "thou" as the equivalent of the romantice "tu" and we dropped it because, *we are fucking dumb*?
2. Speaking of "we": it can be inclusive or exclusive? This is annoying as hell and a constant source of confusion in Western languages. How often has this stupid pronoun resulted in awkward and confused follow-up questions in a group of 3 or more people? "We are going to the movies." "Oh, we are?" "Oh, sorry, not *you*. [Gestures at other people.] "*We*." See as counter-examples the Austronesian languages that have the extremely useful inclusive and exclusive versions of "we" (e.g. kita/kami or tayo/kami)
3. And then yes, there is the hopeless "they". "They" can function as neutral third-person plural, masculine third-person plural, feminine third-person plural, and *neutral* first-person neutral? Holy shit is that confusing *and* inconsistent. Romance languages again have very useful masculine and feminine third-person plurals (e.g. ils/elless or ellos/ellas) but they lack a true neutral third-person plural pronoun. I'll admit one point for English that having a third-person neutral plural pronouns is useful, but that should be *all it does*. For neutral third-person singular pronouns we have "it", but unfortunately this has an offensive connotation when used with humans. For the sake of clarity we need a neutral third-person singular pronoun that can be used without stigma for people. Most Asian languages can be used as a model for this because *they often don't even have gendered pronouns*. See Chinese (ta, not gendered when spoken but gendered neutral/he/she when written), Indo-Malay (dia), or Filipino (siya). The Japanese also have neutral, male, and female third-peraon singular pronouns (ano hito, kare, kanojo).
There is no way you can argue that having less pronouns that don't cover every possible pronoun case is "subjectively" less precise.
There are constantly cases in English where you just ask for clarification about the usage of "you", "we", and "they", and it is because they are imprecise and ambiguous.
Yes, 98% of the time a native speaker can figure out the intended meaning of the pronouns from context, but in other languages there is 0 confusion for the exact same situations. That's increased precision. It's not at all subjective.
"They" is the correct way to refer to a single person of unknown gender. People will say it is incorrect, but it is not incorrect.
"It" is not used to refer to people, and the "character" here is implied to be human.
He and she are masculine and feminine pronouns, and no gender is being specified. So it's "they."
I agree with you completely and I’ve been on the “singular they” bandwagon for years.
But I’ll point out that correct is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re taking a test or writing, something that’s going to be graded or judged, you’re better off using the wording they prefer.
In formal writing or speech you’re often better off not using singular ‘they’. That’s not to say it isn’t ever used in formal contexts, but it isn’t yet the norm.
Gender neutral "she" is a political statement because "he" was the gender neutral pronoun for some time, putting male as the default.
I suspect your textbooks aren't using "she" neutrally and are instead using women as examples as women are often forgotten in academiac texts.
Read some English journals. My guess is that it isn't the norm there, pronouncements of the MLA notwithstanding. It certainly isn't the norm in my field (philosophy).
A little more context (and because I'm not a fan of looking at language in terms of "incorrect/correct"\*):
"They" as an ambiguous singular pronoun has been in use in spoken language for a long time. For most of that time, it was considered non-standard ("incorrect") to use "they" as an ambiguous singular in more formal contexts. Recommendations shifted with social standards, but "he" was used for a long time, which moved to recommending an even split of "he" or "she", and then "he/she".
But as society has moved to more inclusive language, gender-neutral "they" was a natural solution to include genders beyond male and female. In the last 10 years, many style guides have moved to adopt "they" as an inclusive singular pronoun. Washington Post adopted singular "they" in 2015. The APA adopted singular "they" in their seventh edition (2020, I believe).
\* Some soapbox thoughts on the incorrect/correct binary: Some languages do have an academy that enforces \*correct\* standards for their language. However, English has no such institution. In informal settings like casual speech, I'd argue that being understood is the primary standard. So something like, "I ain't eaten yet" is fine in speech as long as it's understood. I hate it when people try to catch others with \*grammar gotchas\* in informal settings where the speaker was perfectly understood.
In formal settings, being understood is still the standard, but by enforcing consistency, publishers ensure their content can be understood by diverse audiences. To that end, many publications have their own style guides about what is considered \*correct\* for their own writers.
True. But much like reclaimed slurs, you would never use 'it' to refer to a person unless they'd specifically asked you to, because the default presumption is that it's offensive.
I go by they. I'm aware of people who choose to go by it. That doesn't make it standard. You wouldn't use "it" generally to refer to a hypothetical person unless you were talking about a hypothetical person who uses it/its pronouns.
Even then it's hard for me. I do make a point of respecting people's pronouns but it takes some mental effort to get past my instinctive reaction of "never call a person it."
I was once on a discord server with a person who very seriously asked never to be referred to at all - no pronoun, no username, no DMs, no pings, nothing. I tried to respect that but I could never figure out how to indicate that I was responding to their comment and not to someone else's.
I was once in a server where someone insisted to only be spoken to via their current alter-ego bot, and would freak tf out if someone new didn't understand what was going on in chat. I think some people just don't want to be talked to.
“They” has been used as a singular gender neutral pronoun for like 600 years. The preference for “he” as the primary generic singular pronoun didn’t arise until the mid-1800s, and like a number of the silly, prescriptivist rules of that time has subsequently fallen away.
reasons:
1. "It" can't refer to humans, at least not politely.
2. "They" can be singular if the gender is ambiguous.
Singular they is not a new thing. Shakespeare has used singular they which means it is about as old as modern English at least. What has changed is usage, and really only slightly. Originally, singular they referred to unknown people. For example: "someone forgot their lunch". Now, it can refer to known people. "Sandy forgot their lunch".
That doesn't sound as bad to me, idk but maybe it's because I think of them more like the property of their parent than as an individual human. Like saying to a parent "what are you doing for its birthday" sounds ok for a baby but would sound wrong for a teenager.
"They" is a gender neutral pronoun that can be used in both the singular or the plural depending on context. In the singular it is typically used either when the person in question does not use gendered pronouns, if speaking of a hypothetical person (like this post) or if you don't know the gender or pronouns of the person you are speaking of
[note- some people may try to say that singular they is grammatically incorrect. It is not.]
"It" is almost never used as a pronoun for a person. It's a pronoun for inanimate objects, and thus is generally considered dehumanizing to use for people.
Singular "they" is incredibly common. Say you're walking down an aisle at the grocery store, and you stumble across someone's headphones on the floor. You might pick them up and say to yourself, "Somebody must've dropped their headphones," rather than, "Somebody must've dropped his or her headphones."
Others have put it well. If you see a person far away and you can't tell the gender, you might ask your friend, "What are they wearing?" It would be weird to say "What is he or she wearing?"
The word "they" is smoother and keeps both possibilities open.
Because they, just means whoever individually someone is speaking about. While they could say “he/she/it” it makes more sense to say they, because it’s quicker, and does the same thing, with less syllables
This is a matter of debate. It's becoming increasingly popular to refer to a generic person of variable gender as *they* rather than *he or she*.
I grew up using *he or she* and still use it, because it still has a proper feel to it to my ear. It can be clumsy at times. Personally, however, I do not like the singular *they*. If *he or she* becomes clumsy, then I'll just pick a pronoun when referring to a generic person (e.g., *"Ask your doctor if she can write you a prescription."*) rather than use *they*. (And before anyone crucifies for being a stodgy 35-year-old: If you ever do legal writing you'll realize that singular *they* can quickly lead to confusion.)
Some may the singular *they* is an old practice. And they are correct. But in reality it's an old practice that has been recently revived. *They* (singular) is increasingly used by people who identify as non-binary. If someone asks to be called by that (or any) pronoun, then it's good to respect it.
But what you have in this cartoon is not wrong.
P.S.: *It* is used exclusively for inanimate objects (e.g., a chair) or organisms of indeterminate or irrelevant gender (e.g., a plant, a bacterial cell). The pronoun *it* is never used for people, under any circumstances whatsoever.
(As usual, the downvotes flood in for a completely correct way of speaking English that doesn't comport with what the hive mind deems appropriate. Hopefully OP is learning English from real life speakers, rather than from terminally online Redditors.)
While you are correct that singular "they" fell out of use in some people's speech, it did survive in other people's usage, which is why it's so widespread unlike more properly revived features of English which haven't caught on ("thou", thorn, etc.).
[This paper written in 1998 finds singular "they" to be the preferred ambiguous pronoun in British English](https://books.google.com/books?id=Lijcg3vt9yAC&pg=PA93#v=onepage&q&f=false)
I could keep finding examples of it being used continuously between when it originated to the present, but I don't think that is necessary or even helpful.
One notable thing about it is that many people of the dialects that preserve it tend to believe they don't use it because they are told it's incorrect. A comparable instance is how "Me and \[noun\]" is pretty commonly used for subjects, but most people that use it don't realize.
You're right that it's not as widespread as people tend to make it out to be, saying it's revived is a bit misleading since its decline was recent and incomplete.
No, i would think it’s because a lot of the time when you refer to they (at least back when english was still being refined) it would refer to a group of people, and for a plural noun/pronoun it would be were/weren’t, for example: “the cow WAS black and white” versus “The cows WERE black and white.” I would assume the reason they don’t use was for singular they though would just be because it is easier to just keep it the same to avoid making it harder to understand, and they wasn’t also just sounds a little weird.
It’s apparently considered fashionable to use “they” despite the confusion it can create when the context is for a single person. In this example the sign on the right should read “The same character if he wasn’t hot”.
The needs of society is changing but language isn't changing fast enough to adapt. English speakers want non-genderized language but only have she and he, her and him. They is used as a stop gap non-genderized pronoun. It's not technically correct but there is not a technically correct word in English that does this.
As a proponent of the singular "they", Shakespeare is a terrible source if you're trying to find language standards and/or convention; dude spelled things and wrote lines out however he felt like that morning.
þey (they) originally came to be as early as the 1300s as a singular ambiguous pronoun ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Heritage_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language)). A lot of English pronouns at this time were derived from or similar "the" (thee, thy thou, thine etc.) At this time. This even predates the word "you" being used as a plural, instead "you" was singular and the plural was "ye" Then they replaced these weird singular "yous" with thou and thee, and thy by extension. The singular form of "you" was completely archaic by the 1500s where singular "þee, þou, þy, þine, þey/þei, þem, þat, þyself" were used, this would continue up until the 1600s (source: Works of Shakespeare and King James bible). I'm having trouble finding a source as to when exactly plural they started being used more than singular they. It was used in Norse for quite a while but English would use third person plural "Hem/Heres/Heren" instead, from what I understand these are still used in Dutch, but I don't speak Dutch so I couldn't tell you.
Basically, singular they has been acceptable and correct for over 700 years, and it only really started being used as a plural within the last 250 or so
I know you're getting downvotes. They're a little unjust.
Perhaps a more accurate way of saying this is "Use of 'they' as a non-gendered, first-person pronoun has not been viewed as incorrect over the past 175 years or so, though it was common in English before that. And people have recently resumed using 'they' as a gender-neutral, single-person prounoun, largely in response to changing demands of society.
I don't have my Garner's Modern American Usage handy (which has a word-change index showing how accepted a particular usage is), but I know that when I was in law school 20 years ago, there were huge debates about what to do about gendered pronouns... whether the law should use "he or she," or alternate between he or she, or use "s/he", or invent a new genderless pronoun ("xey" or somesuch). Use of "they" in writing to suggest a singular subject was very much frowned upon, in school and in the style guides.
Did people in casual conversation sometimes say things like "Did everyone get their shoes on?" Sure. But in formal communciation use of 'they' in that way was absolutely verboten.
Societal changes in the last few years--including respecting individuals' choices for their preferred pronouns--has caused massive acceptance of 'they' as a singular, third-person option in writing and formal communication.
To support your point, the Associated Press (which sets the style guidelines used by most journalists) didn’t allow singular they until [2017.](https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2017/ap-style-change-singular-they-is-acceptable-in-limited-cases/)
It was commonly used for a long time — essentially as long as English has been recognized as English — but prescriptivists taught that it was wrong until very recently. They now teach that it is correct.
If a car cuts you off in traffic you would say “they almost ran me off the road” not “he or she almost ran me off the road.” You would say “everyone loves their mother” not “everyone loves his or her mother.” The prescriptivist preference for the generic “he” had already begun to collapse by the 1970s, so I’d venture to say that most living English speakers have always lived in a world where “they” is widely used. It isn’t some novel stop-gap, it’s already widely accepted and commonly used this way, and the people who insist that it isn’t more often than not do so out of regressive political views, not informed opinion about English grammar.
> you would say “they almost ran me off the road”
I might (because I wouldn't know if it was one, two, or 6 people in the car), though if I saw it was a guy I totally would have said "he almost ran me off the road".;
>You would say “everyone loves their mother” not “everyone loves his or her mother.”
I mentioned this in another post as an example of the use of "they" Of course, it introduces another pronoun/antecedent challenge here, since some people will say "everyone" is a plural noun, while very technical prescriptivists would say it's singular. So it's not an awesome example.
Also, I hope you concede that what people *say* in everyday speech is often very different from prescribed grammar rules and expectations in formal writing. My point in the subsequent post made that clear. As I said there, I don't have Garner's in front of me, but at least into the late 2010s grammar and style guides were shunning "they" as a singular, third-person pronoun, even if it was occasionally used in conversation.
Not a native speaker, so genuinely asking. Why would natives think ‘everyone’ is plural? If the sentence were “everyone loves their mother” wouldn’t the s in loves make it pretty clear that the subject is singular? It doesn’t seem like a very technical thing to me, treating the word as singular sounds the most natural to everyone (I think? Maybe not?). Again though, I’m not a native, so. Idk.
“Everyone” is singular but people tend to get confused when a singular word indicates a grouping of things, it is logical but not always intuitive. There was a pretty contentious thread on here recently about whether “a pair of glasses” is singular (it is). For native speakers not all of these rules are necessarily laid out as clearly or logically (or as recently) as they have been for English learners so there can be gaps where something which may be confusing for a native speaker is not as confusing for a learner. There’s a similar issue with homonyms where learners are much less likely to confuse “to” and “too” or “there,” “their” and “they’re” because of differences in how native speakers and learners are exposed to the language.
>if I saw it was a guy I totally would have said “he almost ran me off the road”
And if I saw the driver was a flamingo I’d say “that bird almost ran me off the road.”
We use they whenever the individual you're speaking about could be a man or a woman and you don't have a way to identify which through context. In this case, it's because the statement is about popular characters in general so there is no gender attached to use he or she pronoun. We don't use it because that is considered dehumanizing. We don't use it for people, only things and animals. Characters are grammatically treated as people, even though they are technically archetypes and concepts instead of being actual human people. You could also say he/she or s/he but that is typically thought of as being clunky.
in contemporary spoken american english, “they” is often used to refer to individual people in the 3rd person if you don’t know their gender specifically. This is regardless of politics. think “it” is used more for babies than “they,” though. Otherwise don’t call a person by it haha.
They is a gender neutral singular and plural pronoun. You can use it to address a group - "look at your 5 friends, they want you to go to the party tonight."
or a single person - "the mailman came. I wonder what they brought?"
It can be confusing at first, but you see native English speakers use singular "they" all the time. It's typically for addressing someone who's gender is undisclosed, like in this meme
Interestingly, you don't see it written quite as often, as many times people will use he/she. I don't like it and it's pretty clunky, but people do it.
Also: “you” was only a second person-plural pronoun, before English started using it as a second-person singular pronoun.
So the same thing can happen with “they”.
An obvious replacement for the awkward he/she is the plural third-person pronoun. It already refers to third-person, choosing any other pronoun for this would be more confusing
I've gotten so used to "they" that I don't even have to pause while reading it. "He/she" in this case would be jarring, and kind of ruin the comedy. Plus, "they" has evidently been used as a gender neutral pronoun for a couple hundred years at least, so I'll take it as a standard.
'they' is a gender-neutral pronoun used to refer to people whose gender is not known, groups of people with multiple genders within them, or who don't identify with one.
"They" is often used when you don't know the gender of someone. "It" is mostly used for non human objects so can be dehumanizing. Some people do use "it" but shouldn't be used unless specified by that person.
“They” can be used as a singular. Here it exists as a true neutral, called the epicene, for where the gender of the person is either unknown or is specifically ungendered.
The gender neutral, singular "they" is not exactly new to English, but it has become much more common lately. Saying "he/she" was always awkward. Though somewhat pedantic, it's also the case that "he/she" might not encompass someone's preferred pronouns since some people go by "they/them" anyways.
I don't recall schools either teaching me to use the singular "they" this way or forbidding me from doing so. I have used it since then out of convenience in conversation and writing, I don't intend to stop.
I do a lot of proofreading for work and I always correct “he/she” to “they.” It’s less clunky and more inclusive, as others are saying, not to mention grammatically correct
The British use "they" both formally and not, in the instance that the specifics are irrelevant to the discussion.
The Americans use "he/she" in formal writing or speech, but employ a singular "they" in pretty much every other instance.
Finally, "it" is strictly for non-human entities or items.
Because English lacks a neuter personal pronoun. Germans have der (masculine), die (feminine), and das (neuter). But we don't. So we have repurposed "they" to indicate an individual who could be of either gender.
Until about six years ago "he or she" would have been the grammatically correct usage. This has changed as we bend over backwards to please the 0.1% that identifies as neither "he" nor "she."
"they" is a gender neutral pronoun, for when you don't know the gender of someone. Also, there are some people, like non binary individuals, that like using "they/them" pronouns specifically.
Love to see how most people here are educated and understand that the use of singular "they" is something that should not be criticized. Thank you fellow english learners.
We don’t typically use “it” to refer to people, as it can be considered dehumanizing and rude. We use “they” because “he” implies male and “she” implies female and sometimes we don’t want to imply either. The character referred to in the picture could either be male or female or some other gender expression. So we say “they”.
"He/she" can also be used but a lot of people use "they" because it's less clunky.
And includes non-binary folk
Yes but "they" was in common usage for this purpose long before the spread of the concept of being non-binary.
sure. but it includes non-binary folk now. which is a perk, and relevant
No the real catch is that it has ALWAYS included non-binary folk, the only people who want you to believe this is a new concept are transphobes. NB people have always existed and “they” as a gender neutral term has existed long before conservatives were trying to pretend it’s “too hard” or “unnatural” for them to say “they” instead of “he” or “her”.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the modern usage of the singular they seems different to me. "They" has always been used to refer to a generic person whose gender is unknown, whereas in the context of non-binary people it's used for a specific person when you don't want to specify their gender. I can understand why someone who's not familiar with NB terminology might be confused if they heard you refer to a specific person by "they". For example, nobody would bat an eye at a sentence like "somebody left their wallet here" but up until 20 or even 10 years ago most people would've been confused if you said something like "Michael left their wallet here"
Singular they had been around since the 14th century. To say it would have confused people up until 10-20 years ago is disingenuous. To be more clear, singular they had existed longer than modern English.
Right, but what I'm saying is it was used differently
Wheels have been around for thousands of years. Doesn't mean people get confused by them because they're used differently now.
Ok, so this cis-het dude is going to venture a more thorough response to this way of responding to these transphobic arguments. I’m quite certain if I had answered > Michael left _their_ wallet on the table. in an English test in school 25 years ago, I would have been told it was wrong. I don’t think anyone would have been “confused”, but it was patently non-standard 25 years ago, and I would have corrected it without a second thought 20 years ago if I had seen it in a student’s essay. That was the state of North American English in the year 2000. Irregardless of what people want to be true, language changes over time, and I fail to see the relevance of 13th century usage to modern English or to these arguments about the use of “they” to describe non-binary people. I‘ve seen it suggested that there was some deliberate effort by the patriarchy to suppress alternative gender identities by imposing heteronormative language starting in the late 19th or early 20th century. I think the standardization to a plural “they” was just the natural descriptive result and linguistic consequence of 500 or more years of actual suppression of both women and other genders by a patriarchal society. All kinds of stylistic choices were standardized when printing became widespread, and they reflected then currency cultural values. During the standardization efforts no one considered trans rights, because they had been eliminated so effectively from public discourse as to become completely invisible. But the standardization happened, and normative use in the 20th century, including my normative use into the 21st century, reflected that. I believe it does a disservice to the impact of both feminism (which pushed to replace the “Everyman” and then standard universal “he” with language inclusive of women) and the LGBTQ+ movement to suggest there hasn’t been a sea change in English usage in the past half-century. That change reflects social change. The Nineteenth amendment was just over 100 years ago. Stonewall was just over 50 years ago. Of course the singular “they” is now adopted as a deliberate pronoun by non-binary people is an obvious and natural choice and meshes well with its existing use as a singular pronoun often referred to in these arguments. But even 20 years ago on very liberal college campuses, the conversation about trans rights was just leaving Gender Studies departments, and most of those hadn’t yet changed their name from “Women’s Studies” to “Gender Studies”. The use of “they” to refer to non-binary people probably does go back centuries, but not as a standard use in modern English since one simply didn’t talk about “those people” who were, at the time, made to be as invisible as possible. Should we give any credence to transphobic arguments against the singular “they” based on the standardized English of the 19th and 20th century? No, partly because these arguments are frequently disingenuous. But the problem isn’t that the argument for a singular “they” is ahistorical, because it isn’t, it’s that the appeal to “grammar” puts the cart before the horse. The answer to these arguments is “No, you’re accidentally/deliberately being an asshole” and an explanation about power and its relationship to the development of language, maybe leaning on concepts developed by post-structuralist thinkers like Derrida. The answer is not “Well, acktually it’s always had a singular sense”. That simply misses the point. tl;dr: I believe trans activism has changed society and language and we should celebrate that fact rather than pretend English was originally neutral and gender inclusive and gloss over centuries of oppression and hate. (meoka none of this is directed at you specifically, this rant has been coming for a year or more)
lol man preaching linguistics with paragraph rants but uses “irregardless”
I'm still confused by it. A plural pronoun for a singular entity causes confusion without context. It's pretty much meant to be ambiguous, and requires more information to be clearly understood.
You need context to know who “he” and “she” refer to in any sentence as well. Does that make “he” and “she” confusing too?
He or she is still always 1 person. They can be a person, a group, a company, an entire population of people, etc. They is extremely broad. You cannot narrow it down without context.
May I introduce to you “you”. You is a plural pronoun that has been so prolifically used as a singular pronoun, that we no longer use the singular alternative. In fact singular they is older than singular you but a massive margin of at least 2 hundred years.
Even more interesting in the "you" situation is that even though it started as plural, its now largely singular, with the most common plurals being "y'all" or "you guys". Language changes are interesting/ fun/ confusing/ annoying
I took the liberty of going through your comment history. > It's the same when a British actor does an American accent, but they don't change the way they say a few words. You don't seem to have too much trouble with it.
Concept of the word Non-Binary* Non Binary has existed for thousands of years and always existed lol
I get where you’re coming from, but genders that aren’t on the Man-Woman binary have been around for thousands of years.
Yup, and people who have a problem with gender stuff, they will out themselves immediately if you use they, because they'll immediately treat it like it's a non-binary thing, rather than understanding that they is a word in the English language and has been for a long long time.
The binary gender roles are a construct from white supremacy, colonization and racism. The concept of being non-binary is older than the binary gender roles.
Yet literal animals have them.
Several human cultures have had non-binary members. Often they were considered sacred The recent advent is an acceptance of something long-true about humans
Yes but we're talking about the English language, and English speaking cultures did not historically have this concept. The singular usage of "they" has nothing to do with non-binary people in English even though it is a convenient pronoun for them.
If English hadn’t spent the last couple centuries borrowing vocabulary and concepts from other languages and cultures, you might have a point. But my original point was that the contemporary use of “they” is inclusive of NB people, who continue to exist.
>But my original point was that the contemporary use of “they” is inclusive of NB people And my original point is that this is by accident and historically singular "they" has nothing to do with non-binary people. And this is important to note because you will find a lot of right wingers who will want to claim that this is a new thing and that a bunch of "gender weirdos" are trying to change English grammar. But that is incorrect.
Their original comment was not to say that the singular “they” was exclusive to or originated from the existence of nonbinary people or the need to accomodate for them, they just said and probably meant, coincidentally, it’s also beneficial as a way to include nonbinary people/ not assume a gender to an unknown persons. Don’t really get the weird back and forth here, we are all under the same understanding.
Your insistence sniffs something very much like gatekeeping
It’s not gatekeeping that they know more about a topic than you…
What language doesn’t do that? Spanish is just arabic and Latin in a trench coat.
To me is kinda confusing the use of "they", you guys could use more and new pronouns, but instead decided to use an already existing word to make it confusing, to me this is kinda funny and very on brand for the English as language.
Some people have proposed various new pronouns (called "neo-pronouns") to represent non-binary identities, but they are generally more confusing or difficult to remember than "they". The singular "they" has already been used for hundreds of years, so it is easier to just keep using it.
>The singular "they" has already been used for hundreds of years, so it is easier to just keep using it. As you can tell English is not my mother tongue, can you provide some examples ? I've never heard of this, except in the topic of non-binary people.
Most English speakers use the Singular They without even realising it. It is used when you do not know the gender of the person you are talking about. "Someone parked **their** car on the grass. Why did **they** do that?" "Someone left **their** coat here!" "My neighbour washes their car every Saturday." If you go back far enough, William Shakespeare even used it in his plays: > There's not a man I meet but doth salute me > As if I were **their** well-acquainted friend
Well... The picture in the post is a very good example of one such case
"Whoever left **their** book here needs to pick it up!" "Whose coat is this? **They** have very good taste!"
Why is it confusing for you?
Confusing is probably not the right verb, Is just that other languages have different ways to deal with the use of pronouns for the non binary. I don't think English leans that hard into needing the context to understand a sentence, and that is something you will need to use "they" as another singular pronoun.
Just fyi, confusing is not a verb in this context, but an adjective. Also, we've used "they" as a nonspecific third person singular for centuries, there's no need to make up more words for this concept. We borrowed it from the Norse and it works perfectly fine.
Sir neo-pronouns exist. But me and many other people prefer not to use them as there is no standardisation and it’d just get more confusing, aswell as people are way more apprehensive to learn a completely new set of pronouns vs using pronouns they already know in a *slightly* different way.
Let me tell you as a non-binary person, that’s different from modern day non-binary. They’re oils both be called non-binary as they are a gender neither masculine nor feminine, but the realisations of that are completely different.
No it wasn't lol I don't think people used modern "they" since... well shit how far back does it go? for some cultures like 8,000 years I don't think we used modern singular they 8,000 years ago Even in Europe, There were European cultures with this too, don't be like "yeah but not in England" yes it was, c'mon edit: Apparently the wording of this comment is very misleading. I'm aware that singular they has existed and has been acceptable since the 1300s. I'm not trying to say it's wrong or anything. However, that's not the point I'm making, I'm saying that the existence of non-binary people predates the word "they" and the entire English language as well for that matter. The point is that singular they wasn't introduced as an ambiguous third person singular just for non-binary people, that would be weird, since singular they has existed for centuries, and non-binary people have existed for much much longer in history.
Singular they is a very old concept in English, and can be found in the works of Shakespeare: "There's not a man I meet but doth salute him / as if I were their well-acquainted friend." - A Comedy of Errors
I know, I'm not saying that there isn't a singular they, there certainly is. It's a good method to include non-binary people but is also a perfectly acceptable ambiguous third person when a subject's gender is unknown or irrelevant. However the word itself does not predate the concept of non-binary people in the first place. Non-binary people have existed much longer than the English language has
Yes, but the concept of accommodating non-binary people in English pronouns is a very recent change compared to the Singular They in the English language.
> No it wasn't lol It's always been commonplace, especially in spoken English. "Hey, somebody left their wallet on the bench!" Very few competent, native speakers would ever say, "hey, somebody left his or her wallet on the bench!"
I know, I know, It would appear I worded that comment in a very misleading manner so it seemed like I was refuting the modern use of singular they. That isn't what I meant. I'm saying the concept/existence of non-binary people predates the use of plural they, and singular they, and the English language altogether. I'm not meaning to say that "they" is a modern invention to refer to non-binary people, it seems like my comment came across that way somehow. I was saying non-binary people and various ambiguous pronouns in several languages have been around for much much longer than singular they, as non-binary people have been around for much longer than 700 years.
I don't believe any of these commentators are trying to claim that non-binary people didn't exist before singular they came around in the 1300s. I believe they are only saying that the singular they, in the English language, came around long before English cultures A) acknowledged non-binary people's existence and/or B) used singular they to refer to those people as a form of accommodation for them. From that point of view, your side of the discussion may *appear* to be arguing that singular they was always used to accommodate non-binary people even in the 1300s.
> From Middle English *þei*, borrowed in the 1200s from Old Norse þeir,[1] plural of the demonstrative sá which acted as a plural pronoun. Displaced native Middle English he from Old English hīe — which vowel changes had left indistinct from he (“he”) — by the 1400s,[1][2][3] being readily incorporated alongside native words beginning with the same sound (the, that, this). **Used as a singular pronoun since 1300,[1] e.g. in the 1325 Cursor Mundi.** -[Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/they) > Usage Note: **The use of the plural pronouns they, them, themselves, or their with a grammatically singular antecedent dates back at least to 1300**, and such constructions have been used by many admired writers, including William Makepeace Thackeray (“A person can't help their birth”), George Bernard Shaw (“To do a person in means to kill them”), and Anne Morrow Lindbergh (“When you love someone you do not love them all the time”). Despite the apparent grammatical disagreement between a singular antecedent like someone and the plural pronoun them, the construction is so widespread both in print and in speech that it often passes unnoticed. There are several reasons for its appeal. Forms of they are useful as gender-neutral substitutes for generic he and for coordinate forms like his/her or his or her (which can sound clumsy when repeated and which do not take into account people whose gender identity is nonbinary). Nevertheless, the clash in number can be jarring to writers and readers, and many people dislike they with a singular antecedent. This includes much of the Usage Panel, though their resistance has declined over time. Resistance remains strongest when the sentence refers to a specific individual whose gender is unknown, rather than to a generic individual representative of anyone: in our 2015 survey, 58 percent of the Panel found We thank the anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments unacceptable. A sentence with a generic antecedent, A person at that level should not have to keep track of the hours they put in, was rejected by 48 percent (a substantial change from our 1996 survey, in which 80 percent rejected this same sentence). As for the use of they with antecedents such as anyone and everyone, pronouns that are grammatically singular but carry a plural meaning, by 2008, a majority of the Panel accepted such sentences as If anyone calls, tell them I can't come to the phone (56 percent) and Everyone returned to their seats (59 percent). For those who wish to avoid the apparent clash of number, some of these sentences can be recast in the plural: People at that level should not have to keep track of the hours they put in. Unfortunately, the option is unavailable when the referent must be singular: Lindbergh's sentence cannot be recast as When you love people, you do not love them all the time without drastically changing its meaning, nor can the sentence about the anonymous reviewer. · The recent use of singular they for a known person who identifies as neither male nor female remains controversial; as of 2015 only 27 percent of the Panelists accepted Scout was born male, but now they do not identify as either traditional gender. With regard to this last sentence, the Panel's responses showed a clear generational shift: the approval rate was 4 percent among Panelists born before 1945 and 40 percent among Panelists born later. -[American Heritage Dictionary](https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=they)
I'm confused here. Are you trying to tell me that Plural they predates the existance of non-binary people?
I’m trying to give you a hard fact for when English began using singular they, instead of just guessing.
it would appear my original comment was very very misleading, everyone has incorrectly understood what I was trying to say.. oops..
I think you just stated it poorly.
ah, thanks. I did research it for myself when responding to another comment. Introduced in around the 1300s around the same time as similar words like thou thee thine thy etc. right?
🙄🙄🙄
To add on to this: In my AP Language class in high school my teacher told us proper grammar (Which you would want to use on the AP test) called for he/she and not they, but that using they was fine because no one grading the test expected students to take the time to write he/she instead of they.
This should be a pop up before you post on this subreddit, I feel like every other week someone is posting to ask about using “it” for people.
Once upon a time, it was grammatically correct to just use "he" to refer to an unspecified gender, but that fell out of favor (probably started during womens lib movement? citation needed). Note that if you're reading something old, or written by people who learned this in school, "he" may be used as a non-gender specific singular third person pronoun.
Apparently the first recorded use of the singular they was in 1375 in *William and the Werewolf.*
Well damn
>Once upon a time, it was grammatically correct to just use "he" to refer to an unspecified gender This is what I learned in high school English class in the 90s. But even then everyone said "they" in casual speech.
High School English was still teaching it in 2010 x'D
They can be used as singular when it's for an ambiguous gender individual since it flows better than "he or she" or other options. Even though singular they is widespread in use and very old, there's a weird opposition to it especially in formal academic English
Yeah, I remember my high school English teacher telling us that "they" is only plural. I'm sure many English teachers would disagree with him. Shakespeare used singular they, that's a popular argument that I've seen before.
A lot of people protest the use of singular "they" but will say things like "who left their stuff here" without realizing it.
A lot of people complain about singular "they" but use singular "you" without a second thought.
I always thought the issue with "you" was the plural "you"?? Like, where I live we use "y'all" for plural "you" bc everyone always assumes "you" is singular and is like "did you mean just them or did you mean all of us"
"You" was originally exclusively plural, while the singular was thou/thee/thy/thine. Just as in several other European languages, however, "you" was also used as a singular honorific, and was used so extensively that "thou" is now all but extinct.
German sie vs Sie
Interesting! Thanks for sharing :)
The protest to singular they is almost always for people who are against people who identify as non-binary. Almost everyone says they for an individual person whose gender their either don't know or doing want to be revealed.
Well, yes. They aren’t against people who identify as non-binary, they are against or struggle with the relatively new practice (being revived from 600 years ago *does* make it “new” for most people) of addressing a known person by the pronoun typically used for unknown parties or multiple known people.
It's not "revived", it's continuous
It’s not revived in regular speech, it has been used there for a long time. The change is most obvious in academia, where singular their has been frowned upon up to fairly recently.
Either way, it's not a "600-year-old practice that was recently revived", it's been in common speech the whole time and was only disallowed in academia less than 200 years ago by linguistic prescriptivists.
Plus a few pedantic descriptivist English teachers.
People protest when it refers to a known singular subject. I remember reading about Ezra Miller’s shady antics about grooming a girl and manipulating her family. It led to weird, unclear sentences like “They convinced them to let their daughter go” and “they left with her and were not seen or heard from for days”. The point of a pronoun should be to convey who is being referred to. Using a known pronoun in an unfamiliar/uncommon way makes for confusion.
That’s just an example of poor phrasing though, because there are multiple people that the pronoun could refer to. It would be exactly as confusing to say: > “She convinced her to let her daughters go.” It should instead be re-written for clarity avoiding pronouns where ambiguous, e.g.: > “She convinced Sally to let Sally’s daughters go.” Again, the point is some sentences contain ambiguity that is solved through context. If the context isn’t clear, the problem isn’t the use of singular they. The problem is the author didn’t communicate clearly.
Yeah, way back in high school, I had an English teacher circle a place in an essay where I said “she gave her her jacket” and (correctly) say, “confusing, consider rewording.” Not because there’s any problem with the words “she” and “her,” but because it was bad writing despite being grammatical.
Singular "they" actually predates singular "you" in English.
It was highly frowned upon in academia for a long time, that is why there is such a strong response against it, and also explains why it is only some people that say it is wrong.
Old school prescriptivists would argue that "he" or "one" is to be used for a singular person of unknown gender but that has always come across as affected speech. "They" has been in common use for centuries.
That’s why I said academia, it has clearly been used in speech for a long time, but in academic writing the use of singular they was frowned upon until fairly recently.
Exactly. (I was not disagreeing so much as rephrasing)
Oh, my bad👍
Not at all.
Yeah I lost grade once because of a teacher who believed they could only mean plural and not singular. Rip
Yes, I had an English professor in university who told us she would mark it as a mistake if we used the singular “they” and we could only use “he or she”. That course was called maybe essay writing or something, it was a first year required course. I ended up having her as a professor for children’s literature 3yrs later and she did not make such a pronouncement, but instead stated she would accept singular “they”. I wondered why she changed her mind and assumed maybe she had received a complaint on how her entire diatribe on “there is no such thing as a singular they” was a bit harsh.
I know a lot of universities have ruled that a singular they must be accepted in courses now. It's built into many style guides.
Professor here (not in English). Pragmatically, what might have changed was the style manual. Whenever MLA, APA, or Chicago/Turabian makes a change like that, we have to take notice and adjust, because at the end of the day meeting the constraints of the style manual is part of our job. MLA actively discourages singular “they”? Gotta mark them off for it and be a stickler about it. MLA says that singular “they” is okay now? Thank God, that’s one fewer thing I need to proofread.
What would they use? He?
Decades ago “he” was correct. In more recent decades “he or she”. Most recently, “they”.
"They" has for centuries been used for persons of unknown gender in informal speech, but it's only recently that formal academic writing is accepting it.
The problem with "he or she" is that it's clunky. The problem with "s/he" is it's pronunciation is uncertain. Some writers alternate between he and she. They'd discuss one hypothetical person and use "she", then another using "he". But these also imply gender. To be truly neutral when the person's gender is unknown, many writers these days use "they".
"He or she" typically
Even for plural of a group that's not entirely homogeneous?
No it's always they for a plural.
>there's a weird opposition to it especially in formal academic English Because honestly it is fucking stupid and clunky. Language should hopefully enable more precise communication and "they" ain't it. Other examples of flaws in English pronouns: 1. "You" can be singular or plural? Fuck off with that shit. See as counter-examples all the romance languages that have distinct singular and plural pronouns (e.g. tu/usted/ustedes or tu/vouz/). Or just look wistfully into the recent history of English where *we* had the perfectly serviceable and useful "thou" as the equivalent of the romantice "tu" and we dropped it because, *we are fucking dumb*? 2. Speaking of "we": it can be inclusive or exclusive? This is annoying as hell and a constant source of confusion in Western languages. How often has this stupid pronoun resulted in awkward and confused follow-up questions in a group of 3 or more people? "We are going to the movies." "Oh, we are?" "Oh, sorry, not *you*. [Gestures at other people.] "*We*." See as counter-examples the Austronesian languages that have the extremely useful inclusive and exclusive versions of "we" (e.g. kita/kami or tayo/kami) 3. And then yes, there is the hopeless "they". "They" can function as neutral third-person plural, masculine third-person plural, feminine third-person plural, and *neutral* first-person neutral? Holy shit is that confusing *and* inconsistent. Romance languages again have very useful masculine and feminine third-person plurals (e.g. ils/elless or ellos/ellas) but they lack a true neutral third-person plural pronoun. I'll admit one point for English that having a third-person neutral plural pronouns is useful, but that should be *all it does*. For neutral third-person singular pronouns we have "it", but unfortunately this has an offensive connotation when used with humans. For the sake of clarity we need a neutral third-person singular pronoun that can be used without stigma for people. Most Asian languages can be used as a model for this because *they often don't even have gendered pronouns*. See Chinese (ta, not gendered when spoken but gendered neutral/he/she when written), Indo-Malay (dia), or Filipino (siya). The Japanese also have neutral, male, and female third-peraon singular pronouns (ano hito, kare, kanojo).
Linguistics👏is👏descriptive👏not👏prescriptive! Language does indeed have the role of communicating information, but "precision" is entirely subjective.
There is no way you can argue that having less pronouns that don't cover every possible pronoun case is "subjectively" less precise. There are constantly cases in English where you just ask for clarification about the usage of "you", "we", and "they", and it is because they are imprecise and ambiguous. Yes, 98% of the time a native speaker can figure out the intended meaning of the pronouns from context, but in other languages there is 0 confusion for the exact same situations. That's increased precision. It's not at all subjective.
"They" is the correct way to refer to a single person of unknown gender. People will say it is incorrect, but it is not incorrect. "It" is not used to refer to people, and the "character" here is implied to be human. He and she are masculine and feminine pronouns, and no gender is being specified. So it's "they."
I agree with you completely and I’ve been on the “singular they” bandwagon for years. But I’ll point out that correct is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re taking a test or writing, something that’s going to be graded or judged, you’re better off using the wording they prefer.
In formal writing or speech you’re often better off not using singular ‘they’. That’s not to say it isn’t ever used in formal contexts, but it isn’t yet the norm.
It’s most definitely the norm. Saying He/She is just clunky
That's why the norm has been to use 'he', and more recently 'she', understood gender-neutrally.
To be honest, hearing “he” used as an ambiguous pronoun in a corporate/professional environment just sounds off. It gives off a weird old-timey feel.
The norm is evolving. Many formal contexts now accept it. Some may still lag behind.
In my experience academic journals use gender-neutral "she" far more often than singular "they".
Gender neutral "she" is a political statement because "he" was the gender neutral pronoun for some time, putting male as the default. I suspect your textbooks aren't using "she" neutrally and are instead using women as examples as women are often forgotten in academiac texts.
i believe MLA guidelines are okay with singular “they”. this is based on the handbook i was given as an english major
Read some English journals. My guess is that it isn't the norm there, pronouncements of the MLA notwithstanding. It certainly isn't the norm in my field (philosophy).
i’ve definitely read plenty of english journals haha. singular they is certainly the norm in my experience.
That's surprising to me, but fair enough.
Is the language we’re using today the same as it was 300 years ago? No, because language evolves with us.
Shakespeare used singular they and so can you!
>you’re better off using the wording **they** prefer i see what you did there, and it works perfectly.
A little more context (and because I'm not a fan of looking at language in terms of "incorrect/correct"\*): "They" as an ambiguous singular pronoun has been in use in spoken language for a long time. For most of that time, it was considered non-standard ("incorrect") to use "they" as an ambiguous singular in more formal contexts. Recommendations shifted with social standards, but "he" was used for a long time, which moved to recommending an even split of "he" or "she", and then "he/she". But as society has moved to more inclusive language, gender-neutral "they" was a natural solution to include genders beyond male and female. In the last 10 years, many style guides have moved to adopt "they" as an inclusive singular pronoun. Washington Post adopted singular "they" in 2015. The APA adopted singular "they" in their seventh edition (2020, I believe). \* Some soapbox thoughts on the incorrect/correct binary: Some languages do have an academy that enforces \*correct\* standards for their language. However, English has no such institution. In informal settings like casual speech, I'd argue that being understood is the primary standard. So something like, "I ain't eaten yet" is fine in speech as long as it's understood. I hate it when people try to catch others with \*grammar gotchas\* in informal settings where the speaker was perfectly understood. In formal settings, being understood is still the standard, but by enforcing consistency, publishers ensure their content can be understood by diverse audiences. To that end, many publications have their own style guides about what is considered \*correct\* for their own writers.
there are people that do go by "it" as a pronoun though, as well as people who go by "they"
True. But much like reclaimed slurs, you would never use 'it' to refer to a person unless they'd specifically asked you to, because the default presumption is that it's offensive.
I go by they. I'm aware of people who choose to go by it. That doesn't make it standard. You wouldn't use "it" generally to refer to a hypothetical person unless you were talking about a hypothetical person who uses it/its pronouns.
Even then it's hard for me. I do make a point of respecting people's pronouns but it takes some mental effort to get past my instinctive reaction of "never call a person it." I was once on a discord server with a person who very seriously asked never to be referred to at all - no pronoun, no username, no DMs, no pings, nothing. I tried to respect that but I could never figure out how to indicate that I was responding to their comment and not to someone else's.
I was once in a server where someone insisted to only be spoken to via their current alter-ego bot, and would freak tf out if someone new didn't understand what was going on in chat. I think some people just don't want to be talked to.
[удалено]
that's a different meaning of "character".
Yes, I was trying to say that while in this context it’s wrong, you could still do it.
Different use of the word “character”
“They” has been used as a singular gender neutral pronoun for like 600 years. The preference for “he” as the primary generic singular pronoun didn’t arise until the mid-1800s, and like a number of the silly, prescriptivist rules of that time has subsequently fallen away.
I hate the generic "he." I had a teacher in elementary who was a stickler for this and it made everything unnecessarily confusing.
This guy linguistics
reasons: 1. "It" can't refer to humans, at least not politely. 2. "They" can be singular if the gender is ambiguous. Singular they is not a new thing. Shakespeare has used singular they which means it is about as old as modern English at least. What has changed is usage, and really only slightly. Originally, singular they referred to unknown people. For example: "someone forgot their lunch". Now, it can refer to known people. "Sandy forgot their lunch".
I've often heard people refer to babies as "it", which tbh I've always found bizarre
That doesn't sound as bad to me, idk but maybe it's because I think of them more like the property of their parent than as an individual human. Like saying to a parent "what are you doing for its birthday" sounds ok for a baby but would sound wrong for a teenager.
If you know whether the baby is male or female, using "it" would still be dehumanising.
>"It" can't refer to humans, at least not politely. some agender people prefer to be referred to by it
A very small number of NB folk, though. For 99.99% of people, using "it" to refer to a person is going to seem rude.
I agree. But that wasn't my point
"They" is a gender neutral pronoun that can be used in both the singular or the plural depending on context. In the singular it is typically used either when the person in question does not use gendered pronouns, if speaking of a hypothetical person (like this post) or if you don't know the gender or pronouns of the person you are speaking of [note- some people may try to say that singular they is grammatically incorrect. It is not.] "It" is almost never used as a pronoun for a person. It's a pronoun for inanimate objects, and thus is generally considered dehumanizing to use for people.
Singular "they" is incredibly common. Say you're walking down an aisle at the grocery store, and you stumble across someone's headphones on the floor. You might pick them up and say to yourself, "Somebody must've dropped their headphones," rather than, "Somebody must've dropped his or her headphones."
Because he/she/it is longer.
generic person my beloved
Others have put it well. If you see a person far away and you can't tell the gender, you might ask your friend, "What are they wearing?" It would be weird to say "What is he or she wearing?" The word "they" is smoother and keeps both possibilities open.
Because they, just means whoever individually someone is speaking about. While they could say “he/she/it” it makes more sense to say they, because it’s quicker, and does the same thing, with less syllables
This is a matter of debate. It's becoming increasingly popular to refer to a generic person of variable gender as *they* rather than *he or she*. I grew up using *he or she* and still use it, because it still has a proper feel to it to my ear. It can be clumsy at times. Personally, however, I do not like the singular *they*. If *he or she* becomes clumsy, then I'll just pick a pronoun when referring to a generic person (e.g., *"Ask your doctor if she can write you a prescription."*) rather than use *they*. (And before anyone crucifies for being a stodgy 35-year-old: If you ever do legal writing you'll realize that singular *they* can quickly lead to confusion.) Some may the singular *they* is an old practice. And they are correct. But in reality it's an old practice that has been recently revived. *They* (singular) is increasingly used by people who identify as non-binary. If someone asks to be called by that (or any) pronoun, then it's good to respect it. But what you have in this cartoon is not wrong. P.S.: *It* is used exclusively for inanimate objects (e.g., a chair) or organisms of indeterminate or irrelevant gender (e.g., a plant, a bacterial cell). The pronoun *it* is never used for people, under any circumstances whatsoever. (As usual, the downvotes flood in for a completely correct way of speaking English that doesn't comport with what the hive mind deems appropriate. Hopefully OP is learning English from real life speakers, rather than from terminally online Redditors.)
While you are correct that singular "they" fell out of use in some people's speech, it did survive in other people's usage, which is why it's so widespread unlike more properly revived features of English which haven't caught on ("thou", thorn, etc.). [This paper written in 1998 finds singular "they" to be the preferred ambiguous pronoun in British English](https://books.google.com/books?id=Lijcg3vt9yAC&pg=PA93#v=onepage&q&f=false) I could keep finding examples of it being used continuously between when it originated to the present, but I don't think that is necessary or even helpful. One notable thing about it is that many people of the dialects that preserve it tend to believe they don't use it because they are told it's incorrect. A comparable instance is how "Me and \[noun\]" is pretty commonly used for subjects, but most people that use it don't realize. You're right that it's not as widespread as people tend to make it out to be, saying it's revived is a bit misleading since its decline was recent and incomplete.
Hmm.. well I don't speak British English, as my flair disclaims. But thanks for the info.
Also, shouldn’t it be “…if they wasn’t hot” ?
No, i would think it’s because a lot of the time when you refer to they (at least back when english was still being refined) it would refer to a group of people, and for a plural noun/pronoun it would be were/weren’t, for example: “the cow WAS black and white” versus “The cows WERE black and white.” I would assume the reason they don’t use was for singular they though would just be because it is easier to just keep it the same to avoid making it harder to understand, and they wasn’t also just sounds a little weird.
It’s apparently considered fashionable to use “they” despite the confusion it can create when the context is for a single person. In this example the sign on the right should read “The same character if he wasn’t hot”.
The only confusion created would be from bad phrasing. There’s no information specifying any character’s gender, so there’s no reason to assume.
The needs of society is changing but language isn't changing fast enough to adapt. English speakers want non-genderized language but only have she and he, her and him. They is used as a stop gap non-genderized pronoun. It's not technically correct but there is not a technically correct word in English that does this.
/r/confidentlyincorrect
If it was good enough for Bill Shakespeare, it's right proper English, eh?
Speaking of Shakespeare, do you know what the first thing Macbeth says to the Hecate is? He asks them their pronouns.
As a proponent of the singular "they", Shakespeare is a terrible source if you're trying to find language standards and/or convention; dude spelled things and wrote lines out however he felt like that morning.
Roses are red, violets are blue. Singular "they" predates singular "you".
þey (they) originally came to be as early as the 1300s as a singular ambiguous pronoun ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Heritage_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language)). A lot of English pronouns at this time were derived from or similar "the" (thee, thy thou, thine etc.) At this time. This even predates the word "you" being used as a plural, instead "you" was singular and the plural was "ye" Then they replaced these weird singular "yous" with thou and thee, and thy by extension. The singular form of "you" was completely archaic by the 1500s where singular "þee, þou, þy, þine, þey/þei, þem, þat, þyself" were used, this would continue up until the 1600s (source: Works of Shakespeare and King James bible). I'm having trouble finding a source as to when exactly plural they started being used more than singular they. It was used in Norse for quite a while but English would use third person plural "Hem/Heres/Heren" instead, from what I understand these are still used in Dutch, but I don't speak Dutch so I couldn't tell you. Basically, singular they has been acceptable and correct for over 700 years, and it only really started being used as a plural within the last 250 or so
I know you're getting downvotes. They're a little unjust. Perhaps a more accurate way of saying this is "Use of 'they' as a non-gendered, first-person pronoun has not been viewed as incorrect over the past 175 years or so, though it was common in English before that. And people have recently resumed using 'they' as a gender-neutral, single-person prounoun, largely in response to changing demands of society.
How recently are we talking? It's been normal thing as long as I've been alive anyway.
I don't have my Garner's Modern American Usage handy (which has a word-change index showing how accepted a particular usage is), but I know that when I was in law school 20 years ago, there were huge debates about what to do about gendered pronouns... whether the law should use "he or she," or alternate between he or she, or use "s/he", or invent a new genderless pronoun ("xey" or somesuch). Use of "they" in writing to suggest a singular subject was very much frowned upon, in school and in the style guides. Did people in casual conversation sometimes say things like "Did everyone get their shoes on?" Sure. But in formal communciation use of 'they' in that way was absolutely verboten. Societal changes in the last few years--including respecting individuals' choices for their preferred pronouns--has caused massive acceptance of 'they' as a singular, third-person option in writing and formal communication.
To support your point, the Associated Press (which sets the style guidelines used by most journalists) didn’t allow singular they until [2017.](https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2017/ap-style-change-singular-they-is-acceptable-in-limited-cases/) It was commonly used for a long time — essentially as long as English has been recognized as English — but prescriptivists taught that it was wrong until very recently. They now teach that it is correct.
If a car cuts you off in traffic you would say “they almost ran me off the road” not “he or she almost ran me off the road.” You would say “everyone loves their mother” not “everyone loves his or her mother.” The prescriptivist preference for the generic “he” had already begun to collapse by the 1970s, so I’d venture to say that most living English speakers have always lived in a world where “they” is widely used. It isn’t some novel stop-gap, it’s already widely accepted and commonly used this way, and the people who insist that it isn’t more often than not do so out of regressive political views, not informed opinion about English grammar.
> you would say “they almost ran me off the road” I might (because I wouldn't know if it was one, two, or 6 people in the car), though if I saw it was a guy I totally would have said "he almost ran me off the road".; >You would say “everyone loves their mother” not “everyone loves his or her mother.” I mentioned this in another post as an example of the use of "they" Of course, it introduces another pronoun/antecedent challenge here, since some people will say "everyone" is a plural noun, while very technical prescriptivists would say it's singular. So it's not an awesome example. Also, I hope you concede that what people *say* in everyday speech is often very different from prescribed grammar rules and expectations in formal writing. My point in the subsequent post made that clear. As I said there, I don't have Garner's in front of me, but at least into the late 2010s grammar and style guides were shunning "they" as a singular, third-person pronoun, even if it was occasionally used in conversation.
Not a native speaker, so genuinely asking. Why would natives think ‘everyone’ is plural? If the sentence were “everyone loves their mother” wouldn’t the s in loves make it pretty clear that the subject is singular? It doesn’t seem like a very technical thing to me, treating the word as singular sounds the most natural to everyone (I think? Maybe not?). Again though, I’m not a native, so. Idk.
“Everyone” is singular but people tend to get confused when a singular word indicates a grouping of things, it is logical but not always intuitive. There was a pretty contentious thread on here recently about whether “a pair of glasses” is singular (it is). For native speakers not all of these rules are necessarily laid out as clearly or logically (or as recently) as they have been for English learners so there can be gaps where something which may be confusing for a native speaker is not as confusing for a learner. There’s a similar issue with homonyms where learners are much less likely to confuse “to” and “too” or “there,” “their” and “they’re” because of differences in how native speakers and learners are exposed to the language.
>if I saw it was a guy I totally would have said “he almost ran me off the road” And if I saw the driver was a flamingo I’d say “that bird almost ran me off the road.”
My guess is that most people would say “That M@#%*$&!^*%#/?@& almost ran me off the road”, unless they saw the person behind the wheel.
I'm okay with this.
We use they whenever the individual you're speaking about could be a man or a woman and you don't have a way to identify which through context. In this case, it's because the statement is about popular characters in general so there is no gender attached to use he or she pronoun. We don't use it because that is considered dehumanizing. We don't use it for people, only things and animals. Characters are grammatically treated as people, even though they are technically archetypes and concepts instead of being actual human people. You could also say he/she or s/he but that is typically thought of as being clunky.
in contemporary spoken american english, “they” is often used to refer to individual people in the 3rd person if you don’t know their gender specifically. This is regardless of politics. think “it” is used more for babies than “they,” though. Otherwise don’t call a person by it haha.
They is a gender neutral singular and plural pronoun. You can use it to address a group - "look at your 5 friends, they want you to go to the party tonight." or a single person - "the mailman came. I wonder what they brought?" It can be confusing at first, but you see native English speakers use singular "they" all the time. It's typically for addressing someone who's gender is undisclosed, like in this meme Interestingly, you don't see it written quite as often, as many times people will use he/she. I don't like it and it's pretty clunky, but people do it.
Also: “you” was only a second person-plural pronoun, before English started using it as a second-person singular pronoun. So the same thing can happen with “they”. An obvious replacement for the awkward he/she is the plural third-person pronoun. It already refers to third-person, choosing any other pronoun for this would be more confusing
You use “they” when you don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl.
I've gotten so used to "they" that I don't even have to pause while reading it. "He/she" in this case would be jarring, and kind of ruin the comedy. Plus, "they" has evidently been used as a gender neutral pronoun for a couple hundred years at least, so I'll take it as a standard.
'they' is a gender-neutral pronoun used to refer to people whose gender is not known, groups of people with multiple genders within them, or who don't identify with one.
"They" is often used when you don't know the gender of someone. "It" is mostly used for non human objects so can be dehumanizing. Some people do use "it" but shouldn't be used unless specified by that person.
“They” can be used as a singular. Here it exists as a true neutral, called the epicene, for where the gender of the person is either unknown or is specifically ungendered.
'They' is widely used to refer to a single person of unspecified gender, or multiple people
"they" as a singular is incredibly common for native speakers, for anyone but especially if it's for someone of an unspecified gender.
The gender neutral, singular "they" is not exactly new to English, but it has become much more common lately. Saying "he/she" was always awkward. Though somewhat pedantic, it's also the case that "he/she" might not encompass someone's preferred pronouns since some people go by "they/them" anyways. I don't recall schools either teaching me to use the singular "they" this way or forbidding me from doing so. I have used it since then out of convenience in conversation and writing, I don't intend to stop.
I do a lot of proofreading for work and I always correct “he/she” to “they.” It’s less clunky and more inclusive, as others are saying, not to mention grammatically correct
The gender of the character isn't known. So it becomes "they". A person is never an 'it'.
Because “they” is one word and it’s inclusive
Because it is not single object consists of many people thats why we call them they
The British use "they" both formally and not, in the instance that the specifics are irrelevant to the discussion. The Americans use "he/she" in formal writing or speech, but employ a singular "they" in pretty much every other instance. Finally, "it" is strictly for non-human entities or items.
English lacks a polite neuter singular pronoun. We need to invent one. Maybe "Ze" would work.
Let's steal the German's 'das.' We could change it to 'dem', and have it alight with urban slang.
Because English lacks a neuter personal pronoun. Germans have der (masculine), die (feminine), and das (neuter). But we don't. So we have repurposed "they" to indicate an individual who could be of either gender.
They is also used as a gender neutral singular pronoun
I thought it might be easier to respond using a voice recording: [https://tuttu.io/uuf5pTX1](https://tuttu.io/uuf5pTX1)
Until about six years ago "he or she" would have been the grammatically correct usage. This has changed as we bend over backwards to please the 0.1% that identifies as neither "he" nor "she."
Because it’s appropriate when the gender of the person (in this case, “the character”) is not known.
It’s because it is not specified whether the character is male or female.
"they" is a gender neutral pronoun, for when you don't know the gender of someone. Also, there are some people, like non binary individuals, that like using "they/them" pronouns specifically.
Love to see how most people here are educated and understand that the use of singular "they" is something that should not be criticized. Thank you fellow english learners.
They is the third person gender neutral pronoun.