👉 An excerpt from "A brief history of singular they", by Dennis Baron
Singular ‘they’ has become the pronoun of choice
to replace ‘he and she’ in cases where the gender of the antecedent – the word
the pronoun refers to – is unknown, irrelevant, or nonbinary, or where gender
needs to be concealed. It’s the word we use for sentences like ‘Everyone loves
his mother’.
Since forms
may exist in speech long before they’re written down, it’s likely that singular 'they' was common even before the late fourteenth century. That makes an old form
even older.
In the eighteenth century, grammarians began
warning that singular 'they' was an error because a plural pronoun can’t take a
singular antecedent. They clearly forgot that singular 'you' was a plural pronoun
that had become singular as well. You functioned as a polite singular for
centuries, but in the seventeenth century singular 'you' replaced 'thou', 'thee', and 'thy', except for some dialect use. That change met with some resistance. […]
Singular 'you' has become normal and unremarkable.
[…] And singular 'they' is well on its way to being normal and unremarkable as
well. Toward the end of the twentieth century, language authorities began to
approve the form. The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) not only accepts
singular they, they also use the form in their definitions. And the New Oxford
American Dictionary (Third Edition, 2010), calls singular 'they' ‘generally
accepted’ with indefinites, and ‘now common but less widely accepted’ with
definite nouns, especially in formal contexts.
Not everyone is down with singular 'they'. The
well-respected Chicago Manual of Style still rejects singular 'they' for formal
writing, and just the other day a teacher told me that he still corrects
students who use ‘everyone … their’ in their papers, though he probably uses
singular 'they' when his students aren’t looking. […]
👉 Dennis Baron – Professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Read Dennis’s blog, The Web of Language, and follow him on Twitter as @DrGrammar.
