Honors Program
Honors in English
Date of Award
5-2014
Thesis Professor(s)
Yousif Elhindi
Thesis Professor Department
Literature and Language
Thesis Reader(s)
Martha Michieka
Abstract
This essay outlines the problems associated with the history and current absence of a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun in the English language. The combination of the social and grammatical consequences of this language gap results in pronoun choices that are either politically incorrect or verbose. Experts’ attempts to fill this language gap have failed to take root on any widespread basis; but, interestingly, middle school children in Baltimore, Maryland created and started using “yo” as their own gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun. Stotko and Troyer’s (2007) study on this development sheds some light on exactly how students use “yo” as a third-person pronoun and proposes some theories regarding the origin of this change in language. This spontaneously produced gender-neutral pronoun has gained as much recognition as many gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronouns proposed by linguistic experts, perhaps as a result of children’s unique understanding of and ability to create language. This recent development indicates that common English speakers will likely spontaneously generate a solution to the current pronoun gap, although this will probably take some time to occur.
Document Type
Honors Thesis - Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Elrod, Elizabeth J., "Give us a Gender Neutral Pronoun, Yo!: The Need for and Creation of a Gender Neutral, Singular, Third Person, Personal Pronoun" (2014). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 200. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/200
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.