considered awkward (Whoever it is, I won’t see him or her tonight). Nor
does it work to use the neutral single pronoun: (*Whoever it is, I won’t see
it tonight).^9 Nevertheless, The Chicago Manual of Style and other
authorities continue to take the stance that singular they is a recent and
unhappy development.
It is a credit to the power of standard language ideology (SLI) that many
people – and you may be one of them – will look at these examples and
say, well, yes, now that you mention it, English is rather inefficient in
these cases. But let’s consider some facts.
First, a language which does not have an overt strategy for dealing with
a grammatical or semantic distinction will have other ways of doing just
that. We cannot claim that English speakers are incapable of making
themselves clear on just who it is they are inviting to dinner. Social and
regional varieties of English have developed a multitude of strategies for
dealing with the singular/plural distinction. For example, in my own
variety of American English, acquired in Chicago, we say you/you guys, in
Belfast and some parts of the U.S. you/youse; in much of the Southern US
you/you’uns or ya’ll; in parts of Pennsylvania you/yousns.
An additional strategy employed by all speakers of English involves a
range of lexical choices that might not engender negative social reactions,
but which show strategic maneuvering: “Would you
folks/people/chaps/fellows/kids like to ...?”
These all come from regionally or socially restricted varieties of
English. Idealized *Standard American English (a term we’ll look at
shortly; see p. 62) is bound, at least theoretically, by adherence to an
inflexible grammar and thus is unable to change to address gaps in the
language system. So then, isn’t it reasonable to say that a standardized
English is not as efficient as the social and regional dialects?
This is a tempting argument, but it cannot survive close examination.
All spoken language will cope with ambiguity of all kinds. If socially
motivated rules forbid reliance on certain grammatical strategies or
lexical terms, then discourse, intonation and body language strategies can
be called into play: