Gender-Neutral Pronouns

[samwitdangol]

Hello!

Does anybody know if gender-neutral pronouns officially exist? I have seen a few examples on the internet, but I am not sure if it is correct to use them yet.
They would be most beneficial.

I know this is a strange place to ask this question, but the people here are extremely knowledgeable and I have nowhere else to ask.

[outin]

Hello!

Does anybody know if gender-neutral pronouns officially exist? I have seen a few examples on the internet, but I am not sure if it is correct to use them yet.
They would be most beneficial.

I know this is a strange place to ask this question, but the people here are extremely knowledgeable and I have nowhere else to ask.

I guess you mean in English?
In some languages like mine all pronouns are gender neutral and some have been invented to those languages who does not naturally have them. Swedes use theirs quite a lot I think. And of course they have been proposed to English but I don't think they have settled in that well. You must understand that there is no one authority that decides how a language evolves. Usually things are officially accepted at some point after they become more common. And some things just never get common even if officially accepted.

Are you a student? Then I guess you need to follow the rules accepted by the institution you study in unless it's a liberal one and breaking the norm is considered fine in good context.

[j_tour]

Hello!

Does anybody know if gender-neutral pronouns officially exist? I have seen a few examples on the internet, but I am not sure if it is correct to use them yet.
They would be most beneficial.

I know this is a strange place to ask this question, but the people here are extremely knowledgeable and I have nowhere else to ask.

In English, no, not really.

I prefer to be a little pedantic and use "his or her" and the like whenever possible.  It doesn't make for the cleanest prose, but at least it's correct, in my view, anyway.  Of course it's gender-binary, which is maybe not the hippest, but it's close enough for me.

"they/their" is accepted for singular use, even in formal writing.  Has been part of spoken language for centuries, and it's accepted in formal writing these days, AFAIK  Occasionally some nerd might try to nitpick on that, but you can point to Shakespeare and that should shut them down.  There's probably an entry in Brian Garner's Modern American Usage or in Birchfield's updated edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage, both published by Oxford UP, and the two standard works on English usage, but I don't have the energy to grab them off the shelf and look it up just now.

Many people writing non-fiction have long made it a point to deliberately subvert the old standard that the masculine is supposed to be gender-neutral when speaking of, e.g., hypotheticals, by more or less randomly using the feminine.

The use of "one" as a pronoun is OK, I guess, but it has a distinctive flavor in that it's more or less an affected way of speaking.  I use it deliberately sometimes if I want the tone, or just to be silly,  but it has too much history to be repurposed, IMHO.

And, of course, as outin suggests, there are some contrivances people have tried out, in a sort of Esperanto way, but none of those have caught on, and I really don't think they ever will.  I wouldn't bother with those, personally, but you're, of course, very much free to try for yourself.

So, not really, not a complete set of pronouns, but sort of, I suppose, is the short answer.

[j_tour]

dp

[outin]

In spoken Finnish we also commonly use "it" for both things and humans/animals. It's quite acceptable to say things like "It plays the piano well" in Finnish while it sounds really weird in English. That would be an animacy-neutral pronoun. The next step in other languages? 

[samwitdangol]

In spoken Finnish we also commonly use "it" for both things and humans/animals.

"It" would sound really rude in English though.

[j_tour]

"It" would sound really rude in English though.

It rubs the lotion on it's skin.

I've told you that many times.

Or else it gets the hose again.

Very simple rules.

[samwitdangol]

It rubs the lotion on it's skin.

I've told you that many times.

Or else it gets the hose again.

Very simple rules.

Sorry for being obtuse; I do not understand what you said.

[j_tour]

Sorry for being obtuse; I do not understand what you said.

I don't want to find a youtube clip just know.  It's from a movie called The Silence of the Lambs where this freakazoid serial has a woman trapped in a kind of cistern in his/her basement. 

So that's where the quotes come from.

But, it's a classic dehumanizing move, at least English, to refer to humans as "it."

I'm sure it's pretty efficient in Finnish, but you can't say that in English.  Not at all.

[ranjit]

Basically, it is seldom used outside of highly melodramatic movie scenes when referring to a person. So you should be wary of using it in any context where you don't want to get beaten up.

[j_tour]

Basically, it is seldom used outside of highly melodramatic movie scenes when referring to a person. So you should be wary of using it in any context where you don't want to get beaten up.

Heh.  First chuckle of the day for me.

Yeah, that would be a good way to start some ruckus IRL.  "What is that thing doing here?  Is it trying to speak?  Get it out of my sight!"

A darn good way to rile probably most people up, regardless of sex or gender.

But, to be fair, I'm sure various autocratic regimes used it to good effect over the years!

And there is an idiom in German which sort of has a parallel in English, name using "Ding" or "thing" to refer to a women.  As in "ain't you a pretty little thing!" 

Still exists, but it's not considered an especially enlightened idiom, unless perhaps you're speaking affectionately to a woman or perhaps a man, in private.

/*ETA the "it" thing is not perfectly analogous, but it's about as good a way to start a fight as, say, walking up to some hillbilly man and saying "That's a nice shirt!  They make that one for men, too?"*/

[j_tour]

From Garner, "Pronouns (D)":

"[T]hey has increasingly moved toward singular senses (See Sexism (B).  Disturbing though these developments may be to purists, they're irreversible.  And nothing that a grammarian says will change them."

That's from the second edition, which was published quite a while ago.

[outin]

I don't want to find a youtube clip just know.  It's from a movie called The Silence of the Lambs where this freakazoid serial has a woman trapped in a kind of cistern in his/her basement. 

So that's where the quotes come from.

But, it's a classic dehumanizing move, at least English, to refer to humans as "it."

I'm sure it's pretty efficient in Finnish, but you can't say that in English.  Not at all.

I know. But languge can evolve...and at some point we will have androids and need to decide what to call them.

It's a bit funny that most of us are quite comfortable with using "it" for children while many people have started to use "hän" (he/she) for pets. I would never do that to my cats, it would seem insulting to speak about them as their were humans...

BTW why isn't there a distinct plural for "it" in English? So when you talk about a group it suddenly does not matter whether they are human or not? 

[thalbergmad]

"It" would sound really rude in English though.

Appropriate in some cases where it is difficult to distinguish between male and female.

[j_tour]

.and at some point we will have androids and need to decide what to call them.

No.

Some restricted domain robots, certainly, but calling machines "it" doesn't seem like a problem.

[perfect_pitch]

From Garner, "Pronouns (D)":

"[T]hey has increasingly moved toward singular senses (See Sexism (B).  Disturbing though these developments may be to purists, they're irreversible.  And nothing that a grammarian says will change them."

No offense, but I am a bit of a purist, and I REFUSE to use the word 'They' for a singular person in regards to gender. They is used for multiple people.

I don't see how someone can claim to be a they in any form. Also... what happens if an ambiguously gendered person has multiple personalities... do you call them a mob???

 

[j_tour]

I don't see how someone can claim to be a they in any form. Also... what happens if an ambiguously gendered person has multiple personalities... do you call them a mob???

 

That's kind of funny.

But, no, in general, there's no putting the cat back in the bag.  They/their in singular is just part of the formal register of the language, for decades.

It does offend my own sense of propriety, but, I can't do anything about it.  I don't want to pull down the Oxford English Dictionary (the real one, the big one), but IIRC that sense in the singular has been around for a very, very long time, in spoken and informal or literary registers..

[perfect_pitch]

It does offend my own sense of propriety, but, I can't do anything about it.  I don't want to pull down the Oxford English Dictionary (the real one, the big one)

Is that the real Oxford Dictionary that also accepted the words 'hangry' and 'yolo'

If so, then I'm happy to live in ignorance.

[j_tour]

Is that the real Oxford Dictionary that also accepted the words 'hangry' and 'yolo'

If so, then I'm happy to live in ignorance.

I guess those might be in one of the more recent Supplements, but I was talking about the original, twenty-volume (or so) edition which gives the earliest print references to words.

I don't give a *** about millenial, Gen-Z slang.

OK, OED has "they" for person of either sex, citations from 1526, 1535, and beyond.  No, I'm not going to type out the examples.  Maybe a techno-fetishist can find a version online, but I wouldn't know.