Shining a linguistic light on pronouns

In recent years the previously innocuous, even arcane, matter of pronouns has become intensely politicised in the often toxic debate around trans issues. I’ve tended to steer clear of this topic, partly because as a newly disabled person who was coming to terms with the life-altering effects of a massive stroke my over-riding imperative was to look after my own mental health, but also and more importantly I feel one of the reasons that this issue has got so toxic is because many cisgender heterosexual men have been so happy to weigh in with their hot takes while avoiding discussion of the underlying issue of toxic masculinity and the abuse and violence against both women and the LGBT community which is perpetrated predominantly by cisgender heterosexual men. I believe this debate would have a better chance of being resolved if those of us with no first hand knowledge and expertise talked less and listened more.

However as a linguistics and grammar geek of many decades standing, I do have knowledge and expertise on the narrow issue of pronouns, and in the hope of generating some light and not heat on that particular topic, I’m going to talk about pronouns. The far right and anti-trans activists have latched on to pronouns as some sort of totemic issue, with some even going so far as to claim that using the pronouns she/her to refer to a trans woman or he/him to refer to a trans man not only do violence to the language but undermine the biological reality of sex. These claims are, to use another gendered term, bollocks.

There are many types of pronoun, relative pronouns, indefinite pronouns, interrogative pronouns, etc. But I am going to focus on personal pronouns, the pronouns at the centre of this culture wars debate. Personal pronouns are an essential part of the grammar of English and indeed of all languages. Pronouns are part of the basic mechanism of language, tracking devices which identify participants in a speech act – the speaker, the addressee, and the referent. That is, the person speaking, the person being spoken to, and the person or thing being spoken about.

In grammar these are known as first person, second person and third person respectively. In English the first person pronouns are I/me/my/mine/myself singular and We/us/our/ours/ourselves in the plural. The second person pronouns are you/you/your/yours/yourself. All these have distinct unstressed and stressed or contrastive emphatic forms, a distinction not found in writing but apparent in speech.

What makes pronouns different from lexical words is that the referent of a pronoun shifts. House always means house, whether literally or metaphorically. The word house cannot refer to a house in one sentence and a banana in the next. A pronoun can. You can say ‘I bought it’ where it refers to a house or to a banana. In the sentence ‘she gave her her book’ the three instances of the third person pronoun she/her can potentially refer to three different individuals, It could be Mary gave Joan Susan’s book or Mary gave Joan Mary’s book. The entire point of a pronoun is that its referent differs according to the context of the speech utterance.

To save space I will now quote pronouns solely in their subject form. Standard English is unusual in lacking a second person plural pronoun, non standard English dialects have innovated one, youse/yese or y’all.

Unlike Spanish, Scottish Gaelic and many other languages, English does not have grammatical gender in its nouns. (Like all languages, English does have nouns which refer to beings of a specific gender, eg sister, brother, but this is different from grammatical gender). However English does have a gender distinction in its third person singular pronouns, he / she it. There is no gender distinction in the third person plural, English just has they.

Although usually described as a gender distinction, the difference between he, she and it reflects more than just gender, it also reflects animacy and degree of personification.

People who claim that they don’t have pronouns are merely confessing to their own ignorance of how language works. Your mere existence as a physical being in this universe means that you perforce have pronouns in English and in every other human language. You may not recognise that you have pronouns. A dog doesn’t recognise algebra, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Your physical existence – or even the concept of your existence – means that you are a third person in any speech act which refers to you, and therefore you have pronouns. You literally cannot NOT have pronouns.

It has been argued that some languages, Japanese is the most commonly cited example, do not have pronouns. This is not true. In most languages around the world, pronouns are a distinct grammatical class of words, a class which is relatively closed in that new members cannot easily be added to it and which behave grammatically differently from words in any other class. In Japanese and other languages claimed not to have pronouns, pronouns behave grammatically like nouns and are an open word class to which new members can be added.

In English pronouns behave differently in grammar from other words, for example unlike nouns, pronouns are not pluralised by adding -s and unlike any other class of words personal pronouns in English they have different case forms eg I vs me vs my vs mine. Some English nouns have irregular plurals, but all pronouns in English pluralise irregularly. No English noun has a distinction in case, pronouns do. In the sentence the dog bit the man, dog is the subject or nominative case, the person or thing carrying out the action of the following verb, man is accusative case – the person or thing being acted upon. English pronouns have different forms for these functions. He saw me vs I saw him.

In English personal pronouns also have distinctive unstressed and stressed/emphatic/contrastive forms. This last distinction is not reflected in spelling but it exists and is important. There’s a difference in meaning between I’m going out – pronounced uhm going out when the pronoun is unstressed – and I’m going out – pronounced aye’m going out when the pronoun is stressed, contrastive or emphatic. The latter emphasises that I am the one going out, not you, or anyone else. English personal pronouns also have reflexive forms myself, etc. In all these aspects personal pronouns act differently in grammar from other word classes.

Other classes of word, like nouns or adjectives, are open classes, there is no limit to the number of new members these word classes can accept. In Japanese, unlike English, pronouns are an open class.

English, and indeed no language anywhere which has gendered personal pronouns, bases the use of these pronouns on biology. Their use in all human languages is determined by social role, or, in languages like Spanish which have grammatical gender in nouns, by the arbitrary and language specific assignation of a noun to a gender class. A noun can be masculine in one language but it referent is feminine in another. In Spanish ‘sol’ sun is masculine and is referred to by the third person singular masculine pronoun él, but in Scottish Gaelic the word for sun, ‘grian’, is feminine and is referred to by the third person singular feminine pronoun i.

As pointed out above, in English the difference between he, she and it reflects more than just gender, it also reflects animacy and degree of personification. It is used of inanimate objects, concepts and animals not imbued with a personality or personhood – whether real or imagined. All animals have biological sex but whether we refer to an animal as he, she or it has more to do with the speaker’s personal relationship with the animal concerned. You refer to a random cat in your garden as it but to your own pet cat as he or she. All worker bees are biologically female but few people would naturally refer to a bee buzzing about their garden as she. Bees and other insects are not generally imbued with personhood, so we refer to a bee as it.

The basic template of an English declarative sentence is Subject Verb Object, eg. The dog bit the man. English is what is called a non-pro-drop language. In order to form a grammatical declarative statement, something must occupy the subject slot. This must be a noun or a pronoun. This is why in English we must say it’s raining even though there is no ‘it’ doing the raining. This is sometimes called a dummy pronoun. In Spanish, which does not have this rule, you can just say llueve – ‘rains’ with no overt subject of the sentence. This rule is also why in English the answer to the question Who’s at the door? can be It’s my mother. Yet no one would argue that the sentence It’s my mother denies the biological sex of your mother, or indeed her humanity.

On the other hand we often refer to certain inanimate objects which are imbued with an imagined personhood as he or she. Those who have an emotional attachment to a beloved childhood teddy bear will refer to it as he. Ships and steam engines are often referred to as she by those who drive or captain them and thus have a personal relationship with them.

What all this proves is that the choice of a pronoun in English is not determined by biology, it is determined by social roles and by the dictates of English grammar. It is thus entirely natural and appropriate that a trans woman, an individual whose social role is female, is referred to by she/her pronouns.

This is also the case in other languages whose speakers culturally recognise individuals who occupy gender roles which differ from their biological sex. The Lakota recognise two spirit individuals, people whose accepted social role differs from their biological sex. The Lakota language does not distinguish gender in its personal pronouns, the word iye means he, she, or it depending on context, but it does have gender specific sentence particles. Yeló is used by men to mark an assertion, women use ye in the same function. Kštó is used by women to mark an emphatic assertion.

Male bodied two spirit people who occupy a female social role naturally use female sentence particles.

The Yuchi people who formerly lived in the South East of the USA also recognised two spirit individuals whose social roles differed from their biological sex. The Yuchi language does distinguish gender in third person pronouns, but does so in an unusual way. The pronoun sedi means she – a younger female relative – when used by men, when used by women sedi means he – a younger male relative. A male bodied two spirit Yuchi person occupying a female social role would use sedi to mean he, a younger male relative.

I cite these examples as evidence that in all human languages where there is a choice of gender in pronouns, the choice is made according to social roles not according to biological gender.

Some years ago gender critical activists shared a blog post which purported to prove that the use of she/her pronouns for trans women undermines the biological reality of sex. The blog post in question compared pronouns to adjectives and claimed that when shown the word red on a green background and asked to say the colour of the background, respondents grew confused, the argument then ran that likewise using she/her pronouns for trans women leads to confusion about biological sex.

This is a specious argument for two reasons, firstly because pronouns do not have fixed lexical referents in the same way as adjectives, the same pronoun can have different referents in different sentences, but secondly, as I have shown, there is no language in which biological sex is the sole determinant of the choice of masculine or feminine pronouns. The choice is always determined by social roles which may or may not coincide with biological sex, but when these do not coincide it’s social role which is the decisive factor.

English has a gender neutral third person plural pronoun, they. Unlike the inanimate pronoun it, they can be used to refer to human beings. Many people who identify as non-binary prefer to be referred to as they/them in the singular. Singular they has a long history of use in English, it is not a new thing. When it occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, to refer to an unknown person, or to refer to any individual member of some group, it is uncontroversially accepted in English. Some examples are:

If a student returns a book late to the library, they will have to pay a fine.

Shakespeare used singular they in his play A Comedy of Errors

There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend

In this example Shakespeare not only uses they (or rather its possessive form their) where its antecedent is a singular noun, he does so where the gender of the antecedent is specified. There are many other examples of Shakespeare using singular they, the usage also occurs in the writings of Jane Austin. So if you have a problem with the modern use of singular they, to paraphrase Shakespeare, thou shouldst get over thyself.

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