I said in a recent posting, “Perhaps the most annoying bug in English is the fact that “two”, “to” and “too” are pronounced identically.” That may be the most annoying bug in spoken English but the lack of a gender neutral third person pronoun is annoying in both spoken and written English.

This bug may be on its way to being eliminated by using “they” for “he or she”. This has got me to thinking about the future of the language. The plural “you” has already replaced the singular “thou/thee” in English. Perhaps someday “they” will oust “he” and “she” completely and become the only third person pronoun, or perhaps more likely the animate third person pronoun, contrasting with “it”.

English has a compulsory plural for nouns, like other European languages (except Turkish) and unlike most East Asian languages. But if the second and third person pronouns stop marking the plural, will nouns be far behind? A few dialects already eliminate it — notably in the West Indies. This development will only be encouraged as English becomes more and more everyone’s second language. I hope someone reads this in 2107 and puts me down in history as a linguistic Notradamus.

There is lots of interesting stuff about singular “they” on the web: See the comments on World Wide Words and by Geoff Pullum . (Was the previous sentence a zeugma?)

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