English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Why does English use singular they instead of making up a new word for this?
In my native language there’s a word dia which has the same meaning as he/she, but it doesn’t give information about the gender of that person.
I’ve seen questions close to this, but they don’t provide the reason for not making up a new word for this distinct meaning.
People have created new gender-neutral pronouns. They are known as neopronouns. (A good list of currently used ones can be found on Wikipedia.) Furthermore, the move to create gender-neutral pronouns in English is quite old. However, none of these pronouns were ever very successful. Few people are even aware they exist. Currently, these new pronouns are usually confined to the transgender/non-binary/queer community, but even there singular they is preferred by the majority (for those who don't use he or she), as found by The Trevor Project, Nonbinary Wiki's surveys, and (as they do yearly) Gender Census.
People often say they don't like the way these new pronouns sound (example from Reddit). Pronouns are used very frequently, and it's definitely jarring to not hear what you're expecting. It's even worse when speaking, having to think and make a conscious decision to switch every single time you use a pronoun. This is mentioned in the book What is Morphology?:
One generalization we can make is that while content words are an open class and it is possible to coin new ones, function words are a closed class. A person cannot easily invent a new preposition or conjunction. Perhaps most telling is the long history of people trying to invent a gender-neutral singular pronoun for English. Suggestions have included co, et, hesh, na, e, and thon. Some linguists have recently proposed tey (on the analogy of plural they, which is gender-neutral), with further forms tem and ter (modeled on them and her). None of these novel words has caught on, while novel content words like modem and cell phone enter the language relatively smoothly.
The Guardian has a very good summary of the history:
Baron's blog walks you through all the failed attempts – starting with the mid 19th century's ne, nis, nim, and citing sci-fi's contributions of neologism: co; xie; per; en. As early as 1878, Napoleon Bonaparte Brown argued that the need for a new pronoun was "so desperate, urgent, imperative that ... it should long since have grown on our speech".
In 1884, thon, hi, le, hiser and ip were variously suggested. Thon – a blend of that and one – was coined by Philadelphia lawyer Charles C Converse and Baron demonstrates how it was the closest thing to a successful attempt at entering the vernacular; it was accepted by two major dictionaries and even adopted by some writers. But it was grammatical pedantry, not feminism, that motivated Converse. He wanted a "beautiful symmetry" in English and to avoid "hideous solecisms".
The second closest thing to enter the vernacular was named after American mathematician Michael Spivak; initially e, es, em (e wrote; es eyes are blue) later ey, eir, em (ey wrote; I like em). Other sources attribute these pronouns (formed by dropping the th from they, their and them) to a competition run by the Chicago Association of Business Communicators, won by a Christine M Elverson in 1975. The Spivak pronouns are used today by some in the genderqueer and gaming communities.
Further proposals – hes, hem, ir, ons, e, ith, lim, ler, lers – sprang up, often suggested by newspapers. Readers suggested portmanteaus: hiser; himer; hasher; shis; shim; heer; hie. Humanist lexicon suggested hu, which can occasionally sound like the Kiwi accent (hu wrote; I like hum). Jayce's system, meanwhile, suggested jee, jem (jee wrote; I like jem). You can find these, and many more, listed at A Chronology of a Word that Failed.
Why has a need for such a short and simple word been so unsuccessful? One opponent of the "bastard word form" portmanteaus, wrote in the New York Commercial Advertiser in 1884 in response to the idea of thon: "All attempts in this direction have failed, partly because it is always exceedingly difficult to introduce new forms into a language, unless they spring up naturally and, as it were, spontaneously."
One technique is to use no pronouns at all. This means that you use a mix of the person's name and perhaps also other context-dependent nouns such as "your friend". The downside is that it can feel clumsy and repetitive if you have to keep saying the person's name, plus it is a cognitive effort to do so instead of a pronoun if you are not accustomed to it. It's not uncommon to see this as a "pronoun" choice in the transgender/non-binary/queer community (as some polls say), and even by a few people online outside that. It's also an extremely common technique to employ when telling a story to someone, when a third party's name is mentioned but not gender.
"It" crops up in many discussions of this type, especially by nonnative speakers. But just as quickly, it is dismissed, because the pronoun it almost always refers to objects, not people. And, in general, when it does refer to people, "It" Is Dehumanizing. There are only a few exceptions, the most common one being babies, and the more obscure case being a small percent non-binary individuals (but not that small — Gender Census 2021 recorded that 9.3% would be "happy for people to use" the pronoun it for them). Still, association with objects makes it unsuitable for use in general: don't use it.
As it turns out, English went through an extremely similar transition before, with the other plural to single pronoun: you.
The Oxford English Dictionary summarizes the change (you can also read their entry for "you" for free):
The use of you as a ‘polite' form of address to a single person progressively encroached on thou (originally the singular pronoun) until by 1600 thou (and its objective case thee) was restricted to ‘affective' (both positive and negative) uses (i.e. so as to be intimate or disparaging). By the late seventeenth century you had become normal in almost all contexts and thou and thee were limited to the Bible and religious use, the Quakers, and regional dialects.
Indeed, the Quakers of old especially rejected singular you:
It was first ascribed in way of Flattery to Proud Popes and Emperors; imitating the Heathens vain Homage to their Gods; thereby ascribing a Plural Honour to a single Person; as if One Pope had been made up of many Gods, and One Emperor of many Men. For which Reason, You, only to be used to many, became first spoken to One.
I decided to do some corpora research to see how popular different pronouns are. To make it easier, I decided to just look at the -self form, which allows me to use a single search. I used an iWeb search for *self, and then searched the results. Here's what I found:
Also note:
Mostly, because they already have singular they. It's been in the language since the 14th century. Prior to that, there was generic he, which continued to also be used until the 20th century and is still found. There are also the inclusive doubles "he/she" and "s/he" ("inclusive" though not as inclusive as we might want, on which more below).
The earliest reasons for wanting an alternative to both singular they and generic he that was an explicitly third-person, singular, gender-neutral pronoun came not so much out of sexual politics (whether to ignore gender where it isn't known or relevant, or to describe non-binary people) but the 18th century dislike of words that did not neatly fit; They being grammatically plural and he also having a specifically masculine use that wasn't clearly distinguished from its generic use upset the same sort of people that got upset by less being used of both countable and uncountable terms while fewer could only be used of countable.
This encouraged people to desire such a pronoun, but it wasn't a pressing need.
Later, the undesirable ability of generic he to carry an assumption of masculinity with it made it increasingly unwelcome, especially when the political implications gained more attention, such that it is now largely obsolete, but they and "he/she" still served enough that most people didn't feel any need to adopt ze, thon,* or other suggested pronouns.
In particular, if someone wanted to specifically indicate singularity and also wanted to be neutral as to gender, but were not considering genders other than male and female (which tended not to be considered until relatively recently) then "he/she" filled that gap. Meanwhile they continued in informal use in almost all forms of English, as much as it was considered improper by some.
Conversely, while people are beginning to be more respectful of other genders, the argument against grammatical plurality being used with singular antecedents has lost favour. As such a reason why people may have favoured he over they 150 years ago or "he/she" over they 50 years ago is no longer as strongly with us.
That they is the pronoun preferred by a great many non-binary and gender-queer people today continues to reduce the pressure to do otherwise. While those who do favour an explicitly singular gender-neutral pronoun will lead us to use ze of zir, or thon of thon, it doesn't lead to a strong pressure to replace they and them in other uses.
In all, while we've had different reasons to be unhappy with the position of they, he and "he/she" over the centuries, we haven't had any reason to be happy with any particular alternative.
*Note also that thon is a variant of yon in some dialects, or of meaning something yet further away than something yon, which wouldn't have been a big pressure against adoption, but would still have been a slight pressure. There are of course plenty of homonyms in the language, but being a homonym does add resistance to adoption of new terms.
Because creating a new closed-class word is a hugely invasive change to people's way of speaking.
It's much more drastic than creating a new noun (euphemism) for an old (derogatory) noun. The difference is that you can to a certain degree choose which noun you use to describe people or concepts, but you can't opt out of using a pronoun because there is only one for one feature combination.
Also, to get a new pronoun adopted, the speech community would have to adjust processes that are much more automatic and ingrained than to adopt a new euphemism. This makes people liable to view it as unjustified interference in their personal affairs and hate every new proposal on principle (often rationalizing their opposition on grounds such as "it sounds ugly").
Ultimately, people are likely to get on board with such a change only if they view the underlying agenda for social change as justified - and sexual politics is a divisive issue on which large segments of the population have quite irreconcilable views. In general, using language as an instrument of social change has a bad historical record as opposed to bringing about the change and then watching language adapt.
There's no authority for English, even for a single major English-speaking country, so there's no-one to mandate the existence of a new word, never mind its use. Such authorities tend to move slowly, and prefer established words to creating new ones in the same niche, and there are arguments for he as well as they as a gender-neutral singular (linguistic arguments that miss the point). So we consider the situation where ordinary people want to use gender-neautral language.
If someone tried to coin a new word to replace singular they, they'd have trouble even getting people to recognise that the mystery new word is a pronoun. Then this new word gets flagged up by a spell checker if someone tries to reuse it, so hardly anyone bothers; they rephrase the sentence instead. Fundamentally though, it's just not necessary, people have been using singular they for years, they¹ just don't realise it – did you on reading this paragraph?
Or to rewrite that with one of the more common alternative suggestions:
If someone tried to coin a new word to replace singular they, ze'd have trouble even getting people to recognise that the mystery new word is a pronoun. Then this new word gets flagged up by a spell checker if someone tries to reuse it, so hardly anyone bothers; ze rephrases the sentence instead.
Some constructions, like (s)he, are clear enough, but are only gender neutral on the assumption of two traditional genders, and there's a feeling that if we're going to make an effort to be neutral, we should do it properly.
When used in writing, it's often not clear how such a word would be pronounced, when spoken, (assumptions of mishearing aside) it's not clear how they'd be spelt.
¹ OK, that one's plural.
A language is not made by “thinking of a translation” for a word. For example, it’s not like you have the Japanese word konnichiwak and then ask yourself “How do we say this in English?”, and following that then answer yourself “Oh let’s use the word hi”.
That’s not how it works – because there is no English word for konnichiwa. It belongs only to the Japanese language and to the Japanese language alone. If you want to translate text into English, you’re not supposed to translate it word by word. The goal of translation is instead to convey the meaning of the original rather than to translate its text word by word in a mechanical fashion.
For instance, English has a lot of adjectives. Not all of these have their own translation in other languages. Again the goal of translation is to convey the original meaning. It so happens that when I say konnichiwa in Japanese and when I say hi in English, they both convey a greeting.
Another example: when someone asks if you want to go out for coffee, you could answer I’d love to. But if you translate that to a different language, in Filipino you could say oo. Three sentences translated into one word? If you translate it word by word innto English, you’d get oo iniibig ko – which is honestly not very normal in Filipino. So you could just use oo, which is just as simple as yes is. The purpose was to convey the message that you wanted tea, no more and no less.
Unless it’s pointed out that you have to emphasize that you’d love some tea, then you could say ay oo gustong gusto ko – which actually also translates differently; word by word, it would be “Oh yes, I do want tea.”
So it’s not that they don’t want to create a new word for it: it’s just that its meaning is conveyed differently in English than it is in the original. They could create a new word for it, but because it can already be properly conveyed without one, they feel no pressing need.
So in my opinion I don’t think there is any need to create a new word for this.
As other answers note, the history of trying to invent a gender-neutral singular pronoun in English is littered with failures, nonce usages, and usages that become popular in insular communities but don't catch hold in dialect-wide populations. Indeed, while any invented word has hurdles to overcome before it is accepted and widely used, pronouns are an especially difficult class of word to change. Why is that? What would have to happen for an invented gender neutral pronoun to be accepted in English?
In short: a linguistic need arises and a nearby available tool is adopted to meet it.
First, pronouns have not been invented often in the history of English. The most widely-known example is the importation of they/them/their from Old Norse instead of hie/hem/hier, which is widely documented in texts on Old and Middle English (see e.g. Brown 2009). In this case, the change started with Norse settlement in the north of England, and grew over a few centuries. It helped that the forms weren't that far off from the Old English pronouns, and that they/them/their provided the additional benefit of being clearly distinguished from other pronouns like he, him, and her. So a possible need for disambiguating pronouns was met by a nearby tool - an adjacent language's pronouns.
Newer pronominal forms like yinz and y'all have formed within dialects from the 19th century onward (Crystal 2011). The history of y'all shows how a need (how to distinguish a plural second person after the separate singular form thou disappears from use) is met with adding a modifier (you all), how that modifier was gradually contracted (y'all), and even how that existing form has now sometimes been adopted as a singular pronoun (as Crystal reports: "Howdy y'all" and "Y'all take care now" being delivered to one person).
In contrast, neologistic pronouns usually don't stick around. Pronouns are considered a closed class (ThoughtCo), which means that new words usually don't catch on to the class. That's why I don't have any examples of wildly successful pronouns made ex nihilo.
To adapt this pattern to the current situation:
We need a gender-neutral third person pronoun
The resulting pronoun will most likely be an existing tool adapted to the new situation, since they're joining a closed class of word
They/Them/Their/Themselves/Themself As you note, one word is already being widely adopted for use as a gender-neutral singular pronoun: singular they. Present in English since the 14th century, especially for following singular antecedents like anyone and someone, singular they has also been adopted as a pronominal set by people who desire a gender-ambivalent option. Merriam-Webster describes its growth:
They is taking on a new use, however: as a pronoun of choice for someone who doesn’t identify as either male or female. This is a different use than the traditional singular they, which is used to refer to a person whose gender isn’t known or isn’t important in the context [...] The new use of they is direct, and it is for a person whose gender is known, but who does not identify as male or female. If I were introducing a friend who preferred to use the pronoun they, I would say, “This is my friend, Jay. I met them at work.”
So we have a need for people who don't identify as male or female to have a pronoun suited to them, and a tool that - while not originally nonbinary - did escape the conventional association with a single gender. So people who heard it and didn't initially understand its use would have a better chance of puzzling it out, or remembering its use afterwards. That makes they an effective option.
Variants like themself also show considerable promise, since the form *predates *themselves** but had fallen in popularity in the early modern period (Merriam-Webster). It encounters the problem that themselves, with the plural selves, may be perceived as plural in singular contexts. Having the available historical context, and the well-known word self available, helps the argument for themself, though it has not caught on widely in publications.
Other Pronouns - What Might Stop Them? Other proposed pronouns include xe and xir, hir, and many others (UWM). They involve changing vowels or consonants to create new and distinct forms. These forms have big hurdles that they need to overcome:
familiarity, or how to make these sound comprehensible and clear upon a first or second usage, compared to the other available options
pronunciation, or how to make the sounds
Xe and hir do okay, at least in writing, because they are relatively close to a recognizable pronoun. With xe, a reader can puzzle out that the h/sh of he or she have been replaced by an x that is neither one. Hir looks kind of halfway between him and her. Neither is quite as familiar as they.
Regarding pronunciation, it may not be clear how to pronounce the x in xe: is it /zi/ or /ɛksˈi/ or /ʃi/? With hir, it may not be clear how to distinguish the vowel from related vowels, like the one in her. Neither are insurmountable with a little teaching, but that in itself poses an issue in a closed system - new pronouns have tended to spread without being formally taught. So it will take some time to see if the proponents of these new pronouns can make the words catch on.
So combined, issues of familiarity and pronunciation may hinder these other pronouns from taking their place in the general population, even if they're familiar to the LGBT community and many of their allies. Even if, in theory, we agree that a totally separate third person nonbinary pronoun would be better, they benefits from being more familiar and easier to say.
Unlike in a language like Japanese, pronouns are a closed class. That means it's really hard to create a new personal pronoun (unlike Japanese where they fall in and out of favor over the span of decades). "They" has simply been around longer, so all the various neopronouns (e.g. xe, zir) never really caught on.
The only instances I'm aware of where a closed-class neopronoun has caught on are:
Why-questions are often too broad because they have no unique answer if too many factors contribute to the problem.
The trivial answer in this one case is that people almost certainly have made up words, and do use various circumscriptions, to refer to a single third person of unidentified or non-binary gender, but these did not catch on. One reason is that the word was already in place ("they"). Also, circumscription works reasonably well ("a person", "a certain someone", more topical nouns; note that nouns can become pronouns on occasion, in other languages, and the grammatical distinction in English is fairly arbitrary, see also "someone", but "''the'' same one", from the same root in fact). In ternary logic, "don't care", or "X", may be considered one half of an unbalanced binary branching tree (which can be balanced by introducing another "don't care" for free, but this should not distract us).
In particular, I doubt that "they" and "they" were the same word (singular and respectively plural). In fact, German die is very much related. The homonymy stems very likely from sound change affecting originally different exponents of a common root that is also observed in the, there, that, etc. The word dia that is mentioned in the question looks like it might well belong here, too. Very problematically, one might then ask why these changes have occurred, yet the common consensus in linguistics is still very often that they are arbitrary. Which brings us back to my initial premise, that the question is too broad; I might add, lacking in research, as I fully admit that my answer is lacking as well.
Broadly because the great majority of English speakers don't notice that there's a question, and half the rest don't understand. They simply use what they grew up hearing, even if they never actually listened.
To get at "why", they'd first need to break the topic into at least two questions, strictly speaking separate:
Is "singular they" an accepted part of English?
How, when and why is "singular they" acceptable?
I suggest most Users are more than happy to answer "Yes (of course)" to the first and consign all discussion of "how" or "when" or "why" to such a geeky, nerdy part of Academia, it could never enter their own, every-day speech, so why look further?
Those who do care generally recognise that little thought is needed to show most uses up as abuses, so why look further?
What remains prolly is purely academic again, so why look further?