Name: The Word on Language and Grammar with Anne Curzan, Part 6
Uploaded: 2014-06-20T15:52:48.000Z
Duration: 3 min 57 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

One of my colleagues and I get into heated debates in the hall about whether or not the

Adverbs of manner

pronoun "they" can be singular. I say it can, he vehemently disagrees.

What we’re talking about here is often called the singular generic pronoun question. We

have the pronoun “he” for males, we have “she” for females, we have “it” for

inanimate objects, but what do you do when you're referring to a person of unknown or

We could take a sentence like, “A teacher should learn (blank) students’ names.”

“His” suggests the teacher is male. “Her” suggests the teacher is female. “His or

her” seems a bit cumbersome. So what do we do? In the spoken language what many of

us would do, we’d say, “A teacher should learn their students’ names.” We would

use “they.” Now some people will say but “they” cannot be singular. Here's my evidence

If I say to you, “I was talking to a friend of mine and they said it's a terrible movie.”

Most people, for most people, that sentence would go unremarked. I was talking to “a”

friend of mine and “they” said. I'm clearly talking about one person, but I don’t want

you to know whether they're male or female or it doesn't matter. And so I say “they.”

What about the argument that it's impossible for a word to be both singular and plural

at the same time. Well, I would say we already have evidence in the language that it's very

possible. If you take the pronoun “you,” you can be singular. Talking to one person,

“You are very wonderful.” I'm talking to a whole group of people, “You are very

And we use the same verb “are” in standard varieties of English for both one person and

many people. “They” has done exactly the same thing to take on a singular and plural

meaning and it’s actually been doing that for centuries. Jane Austen used singular “they,”

Shakespeare used singular “they.” I have found examples going back into the Middle

So speakers a long time ago solved the problem of how do you refer to a person of unknown

or unspecified gender. It was the eighteenth century when grammarians told us that singular

“they” was not a good idea, and that we should use “he” instead. It was the 1970s

with feminism that people said using singular “he” is sexist we need to do something

else, and we were all told to use “he or she.” And many of us use that when we write,

but when we speak we tend to use “they” and studies show that the vast majority of

the time most of us use singular “they.”

So it's a problem that we as speakers have already solved. The interesting question is,

at what point will we be told that we’re allowed to write singular “they” down?

And you can watch, it’s becoming more and more common, you’ll now see singular “they”

in newspapers and magazines as it slowly creeps its way into more formal writing out of the