Study Explores Growing Use of They/Them Pronouns
newsweek.comnew study in the journal Glossa Psycholinguistics.This marks the first study into the use of nonbinary pronouns in spoken storytelling, the researchers said."Within the last decade, people have started to use 'they' as a personal pronoun, often because they identify as nonbinary or gender nonconforming," Jennifer E.
Arnold, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill College of Arts and Sciences, said in a statement. "This usage is called non-binary 'they.' This change is new, and it is not fully understood how our mental language system is changing as a result."People have always used "they" or "them" to refer to a single person, but this was usually only when the person's gender was unspecified or unknown.
Now, however, with more cultural awareness of nonbinary people, language is shifting to increasingly refer to single people using they/them pronouns."We found that in a storytelling context, college students use singular 'they' for reference to a character whose pronouns are they/them in a very similar way as they use he/she for characters who use binary pronouns.
Because this usage is new, our participants revealed a little difficulty but overall were fairly successful," Arnold told Newsweek.A survey by the Pew Research Center found that an increasing number of people knew someone who went by gender-neutral pronouns, jumping from 32 percent to 46 percent among respondents under 30 and from 19 percent of 29 percent among respondents 30 to 49 years old."I have observed that the use of they/them as personal pronouns began to appear in mainstream culture within the last decade.
