The Problem

I had a thought a while ago about the issue in English that gender-neutral singular pronouns (they/them/their) are the same as plural pronouns (they/them/their). This renders sentences like, “They are by the pool,” ambiguous. Are we talking about one person or multiple? There is just no way to know outside of context. Even then, our information can be insufficient to resolve the ambiguity.

A Solution

An idea I had to resolve this ambiguity would be simply use the singular conjugation of the verb when we’re referring to a singular gender-neutral person and to use the plural conjugation when we’re referring to a group. Disambiguated versions of the example above about the person(s) and the pool would look like this:

• Gender-Neutral Singular: “They is by the pool.”
• Plural: “They are by the pool.”

The singular sentence reads identically to how it would if it were masculine- or feminine-gendered, with the exception that the pronoun (“he” or “she”) is swapped out for “they”. It maintains the singular conjugation of “is” instead of “are”.

This form is also subject to phonetically convenient contractions:

• “They is by the pool.” -> “They’s by the pool.”

Just to see how this solution would look on paper, I wrote my last short story using the form I propose.

Issues

This form doesn’t solve the problem for many English dialects in that it requires the copular verb (“be”) to be present and conjugated. For example, in African American Vernacular English, the copula is often dropped (Wolfram & Schilling, 2015, p. 221), so the pool example could read, “They by the pool.” This form demonstrates the weakness of this proposal. Using a verb conjugation to disambiguate the subject means the verb has to be there. A better solution would be to simply have a set of unambiguous gender-neutral singular personal pronouns, for example, “ze/zem/zir” as has been proposed elsewhere, however, such a solution would require a much more intensive change in productive speech.

1. Wolfram, W., & Schilling, N. (2015). American English: Dialects and Variation. John Wiley & Sons.