Right before our eyes

The English language has changed right before our eyes.

The fact of change is no surprise. Anyone who has tried to read a line or two of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (which dates from a little less than 700 years ago) knows that the English we speak today is markedly different than that of our ancestors.

But what is striking to me is that there is one very interesting example of linguistic change that is going on right now, and which has its roots in cultural shifts of the last 40 years.

Now, I've never studied linguistics, and I'm not even particularly good at foreign languages. But I think the history of language is one of the most fascinating of all academic subjects, and I often wish I had encountered it earlier on in life. My first real exposure to it was a few years ago, when I listened to Prof. Seth Lerer's course through the Teaching Company, entitled, "History of the English Language."

One of the things that Prof. Lerer points out in that series of lectures is that the vocabulary and grammar of a language evolve over time. Anyone who has studied both Latin and one of the modern Romance languages (which are direct descendants of Latin) can see this easily. Latin is a highly inflected language, which can do without such grammatical features as articles and prepositions. Word order in a Latin sentence is only minimally important. For a language like French or Spanish, on the other hand, there are lots of articles and prepositions. And while both those languages are much more inflected than modern English, for instance, the grammatical sense of a sentence is still heavily dependent on word order.

I'm not entirely sure why such feaures as morphology (the way words are formed) and syntax (the way sentences are constructed) change in the way they do. Certainly, geographic and political pressures play a role. For instance, one of the reasons English has evolved in the way that it has is because of the competing pressures of Anglo-Saxon, French, and Danish during the Middle Ages (when groups of speakers of those various languages all vied for political control of England, the winners being the Norman French after the Battle of Hastings in 1066). But there are some shifts that I've never heard a linguist explain with any satisfaction. For instance, why the heck did the "Great Vowel Shift" occur in the 15th and 16th centuries in Great Britain, such that English-speakers now pronounce our vowels with 'long' and 'short' sounds in a way different from other European languages? Have you ever thought about how strange that is?

But enough of that. Here's the point of this post: In the past 40 years or so, English has begun to use its third-person plural pronoun in a way never before seen. We have gender-specific singular third-person pronouns (he, his, him; she, hers, her), while our plural third-person pronoun (they, theirs, them) is neuter. This means that you would say, "If Andrew wants to go to the ballgame, he will have to purchase a ticket." Or, "I gave Sally the book that belongs to her." Or, "David and Amanda need to wash their car."

The problem that leaves is what to do with a hypothetical individual whose gender is not known. In the past, the grammatical custom (and I use 'custom' because I am unsure whether we should ever talk about grammatical 'rules') has been to assume the masculine. So, a proper sentence would read as follows: "If someone wants to eat lunch, he will have to pay for it." Or, "Everyone will want his own seat."

This raises obvious problems in our current culture, where assuming the masculine in a grammatical sense is seen as prejudicial and unfair. We view gender in starker terms than speakers of other languages do, I think. For instance, note that we do not make a distinction between grammatical gender and biological gender (as is the case in many European languages). In Spanish, the house is la casa, even though a house is not a female. And the cat is el gato, even if the particular cat in question is female! But in English, the house is the house, and the cat is the cat. Our nouns are all, essentially, neuter (with a few limited exceptions). Only nouns pointing to a biologically gendered subject receive grammatical gender.

Now I'm not sure whether this is the case, but my guess is that our lack of grammatical gender in modern English has made us less tolerant of assuming biological gender in our sentence construction when the actual subject in question is hypothetical. In speaking, if I constantly said, "Anyone who wants a good grade will have to do his best work," I can assure you that it would be noticed with disapproval by my hearers.

So what is the solution? Well, the fascinating thing about language is that new rules are never planned and implemented in a programmatic way. They almost always arise due to some pressure and result in changed customs of usage. So a few years ago, you might hear something like this: "Anyone who wants a good grade will have to do his or her best work." To be sensitive to the females in any mixed gender assembly, the "his or her" would be employed to show that the females were duly noted and valued. But the problem is that saying "his or her" (or "he or she") every time a situation like that comes up is cumbersome - particularly in spoken English.

Thus, the culture is arriving at what will probably become a new standard usage. And significantly, it involves a change in English syntax that results in a truly new meaning for our third person plural pronoun. It looks like this:

"Everyone wants to own their own home."

"If someone wants to go to the game, they will have to buy their own ticket."

"Anybody can write a book, but it takes a good author to have their first book published."

You see what's happening here? All those subjects - everyone, someone, anybody, and author - are all singular and of unknown gender. But whereas past usage would dictate that you use the corresponding masculine pronouns - his, he, his, and his - the language is changing to privilege the only neuter third-person pronoun available. And ironically, it is plural.

This is fascinating. 'It' and 'its' at first glance seem to be a better choice than 'they' and 'theirs,' but our singular neuter third-person pronouns don't ever work in English to describe human beings. So because of a changing political culture that values women in different ways (which, some would say, means that it values them at all in the public sphere), we are changing our language such that a formerly plural pronoun can now be correctly used as either singular or plural.

If you've read this far, I would suggest that you perk up your ears and listen for the way this new syntax gets used in daily speech. I've been doing it for the past few weeks, and I can tell you that it is nearly universal. In the past few days, I've heard it used in a sermon, multiple public lectures, and casual conversation.

So is this good or bad? Well, it's neither. Grammar is morally neutral, and it shifts so that human beings can better communicate with one another. Our culture has achieved something of a consensus in deciding that hypothetical subjects of unknown gender in a sentence should no longer be assumed to be male. And since we lack an appropriate singular third-person pronoun to represent ambiguous gender, we've simply taken a neuter (plural) pronoun and pressed it into service.

The English language has changed.

Right before our eyes.