Singular they is the use in English of the pronoun they or its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves. It typically occurs with an unspecified antecedent, as in sentences such as: The singular they emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they.
About Singular they in brief
Singular they is the use in English of the pronoun they or its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves. It typically occurs with an unspecified antecedent, as in sentences such as: The singular they emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they. Singular they has been criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who consider it an error. Its continued use in modern standard English has become more common and formally accepted with the move toward gender-neutral language. In the early 21st century, use of singular they with known individuals emerged for some non-binary people. They in this context was named Word of the Year for 2015 by the American Dialect Society, and for 2019 by Merriam-Webster. In 2020, the Americandialect Society also selected it as word of the Decade for the 2010s. The \”singular they\” permits a singular antecedENT, but is used with the same verb forms as plural they, and has the same inflected forms as plural they, except that in the reflexive form, themself is sometimes used instead of themselves. In 2002, Payne and Huddleston, in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, called its use in standard dialect \”rare and acceptable only to a minority of speakers\” but \”likely to increase with the growing acceptance of they as a singular pronoun\”. It is useful when referring to a single person of indeterminate gender, where the plural form themselves might seem incongruous.
An examination by Jürgen Gerner of the British National Corpus published in 1998 found that British speakers, regardless of social status, age, sex, or region, used the singular they overwhelmingly more often than the gender- neutral he or other options. The earliest known explicit recommendation by a grammarian to use the generic he rather than they in formal English is Ann Fisher’s mid- 18th century A New Grammar assertion that \”The Masculine Person answers to the general Name, which comprehends both Male and Female; as, any Person who knows what he says\” as quoted by Ostade. It has been argued that the real motivation for promoting the singular he was to promote the real and generic he, which was avoided as being cumbrous and avoided being avoided as being ‘cumbrous’ and ‘cringe-worthy’ The masculine does not really represent a feminine antecedents or implies both genders, but the construction is frequently found when the antecedente includes both masculine and feminine or is a word in each of many persons, – the preferred method is to put the masculine singular in the following word, or a distributive adjective in each case. This is not considered the best usage, but it is the logical usage, the logical explanation for the use of the singular, including an adjective or a noun modified by the plural of the noun.
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This page is based on the article Singular they published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 10, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
