In Defense of Neopronouns

There has been much controversy in recent years regarding the LGBT
community’s adoption/revival of new pronouns in the English language.
However, I believe that this outrage is a bit undeserved, and can be retorted to
quite easily.

The Precedent for an Open Class of Pronouns

An idea which may seem strange to some English speakers (but probably not to
speakers of Indonesian and several others) is the idea of open-class pronouns.
Take English verbs. We often coin new verbs, in fact, if someone simply uses a
noun as a verb for the first time, we don’t even tend to blink, it’s a fully
grammaticalized, normal transformation in English.

For example, "to google (smth.)”, or "to Anki the entire thing" (this one's more
niche but, I think I got the point across.) (open-class verbs are really common
in gaming slang, e.g "to cheese the boss fight", to do it unfairly/while
cheating/cheaply) Virtually anything can just be “verbed”, with no suffix
applied. (see what I did there?)

This is of course, not universal, as languages such as Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu)

does not allow new grammatical verbs to be coined directly anymore, but
instead, for a helper/auxiliary verb karnaa/करना/‫ کرنا‬is used to make a new verbal
construction. Japanese has almost the same system with suru/する.

So that's what an open-class word class is (and what it looks like when it’s not).
Word classes have been taught to most in school, adverbs, nouns, verbs, etc.
They are simply groups of words that are treated similarly / have a similar
function in how people use the language, its grammar. In this case the focus is
on pronouns.
Well first off, what *is* a pronoun? Simply a word which stands in for other
words, when referring to something. There are personal pronouns, such as I,
We, He, She, It, They, You, but also demonstrative pronouns like That, Those,
This, These, which simply “point” to a referent (= something being talked
about). There’s also interrogatives like Who, What, Where, and more, but
right now, personal pronouns are relevant.

Now some languages like Japanese and Indonesian (I can only give specifics on
Japanese, as I've studied it for several years), have pretty much totally open-
class personal pronouns. Pronouns have been added historically over time.

Some examples from Japanese:

for "I/me":

私 (watashi), very common considered mildly formal

俺 (ore) implies a level of "rough manliness" (a variation found in fiction is

"oresama", implying high sense of self-importance)

僕 (boku) implies a childish, usually stereotypically "boyish" nature

https://japaneselevelup.com/100-ways-to-say-i-in-japanese/ (article for

reference, that's not even all!)

for "you":

あなた (anata) standard, quite polite, for strangers, but a bit distant-sounding

きみ (kimi) more casual, usually used towards younger children or close

friends
おまえ (omae) rather rough and rude, but from fathers to sons it can be normal

そちら (sochira) very distant and impersonal, used in very formal/polite

settings

https://japaneselevelup.com/100-ways-to-say-you-in-japanese/ (Yayyy, more

reference articles)

Now you may have noticed it's mentioned many of these are dated or mainly
used in fiction, but variety in pronouns is very common in real life too, as the
data and studies on this page show:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pronouns

While I'm not an Indonesian/Malay expert, the two closely related languages
have open-class third pronouns for a fact:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malay_grammar#Pronouns (I tried finding more
sources on forums, and I know this is just hearsay but, my Indonesian friend
can attest to all this.)

And keep in mind, languages evolve all the time. In fact a dominant theory is
that pronouns, especially third-person, mainly evolve from older more open-
class systems across most languages which have them. (yes, some don't have
them.)

To some degree, this happens in countless forms in all languages, e.g: in

English, some dialects commonly use “man” as a word for “this one guy / he /
that guy” (“Man came up to me and said”)

Of course, not all languages even have gender-based pronouns. There are
languages with gender neutral pronouns, such as Tagalog. Japanese doesn’t
even have 3rd-person pronouns, strictly speaking, it simply uses words for
“guy” or “girl” or “this/that (person [implied])”. Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu),
while grammatically marking only both feminine/masculine, has *deixis*-
based pronouns, meaning, defined by distance.
यह/ये ‫“ یہ‬ye” = nearby to speaker, “this/these”, he/she/etc

वह/वे ‫“ وہ‬wo/we” = far from speaker, “that/those”, he/she/etc

So we clearly see that not all languages operate like English when it comes to
pronouns of all kinds, be it, first, second, or third-person.

It is simply the case that the system of binary (and sometimes neuter and/or
inanimate pronouns such as Engl. “it” or German “es”) 3rd-person pronouns is
common in Germanic, Romance, and other European language families, and
these are the languages which dominate our modern world as a result of
colonialism. There is absolutely nothing inherently superior or dominant about
this system.

Naturalism Of Neopronouns

But despite this, some may claim this community of neopronoun users is
“artifically” inflating the usage of these. So what? Language is inherently a
social product with a social existence. It literally *can’t* exist without people
continuously using it with one another, passing it down, etc. And language
evolution is an utterly inevitable part of that. It cannot be halted, no matter how
many linguistic puritans or conservatives of the past and present have tried.   

Beyond the simple fact of language change “from below” (i.e, through random
changes in the populace), historical/systemic upheavals have changed language
too.

When the Normans invaded England in 1006, they brought so much French to
this language that it's literally almost a third French in origin now, all because
of it being the new nobility's language!
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in_English)

The same has occured for religious reasons involving Arabic all over the
Muslim world, with my native language Urdu even gaining massive amounts of
Arabic loanwords and adopting the Arabic writing system, despite it not fitting
even remotely well.

That being said, not all attempts at influencing language as such shall succeed,
such as the Académie Française or Royal French Academy’s attempts to resist
evolution in usage of the French language, which has only minorly succeeded
in slowing the acceptance of some changes in the formal written language, and
that’s about it.

Ultimately, it shall all depend on the societal and cultural factors, the material
conditions which affect the given situation. Regardless, consciously introducing
a feature into common usage is not uncommon, nor is it strange or undesirable.
It has consistently been done by many communities over time, either for
prestige or respect reasons. (An example would be “taboo”s in Kwaio culture
and language:

Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knv1OSMW2rU
http://www.jps.auckland.ac.nz/document/Volume_78_1969/
Volume_78%2C_No._2/Kwaio_word_tabooing_in_its_cultural_context
%2C_by_Roger_M._Keesing_and_Jonathan_Fifii%2C_p_154_-_177/p1,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249425744_Concealment_Confession
_and_Innovation_in_Kwaio_Women%27s_Taboos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_speech

And to all the prescriptivists who think it's "not proper English", I recommend
you take a look at what "proper English" looked like 1000 years ago.

Fæder ure
ðu ðe eart on heofenum
si ðin nama gehalgod
to-becume ðin rice
geweorþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofenum.
Urne ge dæghwamlican hlaf syle us to-deag
and forgyf us ure gyltas
swa swa we forgifaþ urum gyltendum
ane ne gelæde ðu us on costnunge
ac alys us of yfle.

If this is what you’d be willing to define as “pure English”, I’m a bit worried
for you, and it wouldn’t even make sense, since one could simply go further
and further back to Proto-Germanic, Proto-Indo-European, or who knows how
much further.

Aside from that, modern scientific linguistics has always taken a staunchly
descriptivist approach, which is simply interested in understanding how
people's usage of language changes it over time, not to make unnecessary
presumptions and give prescriptions about “one ought to speak”.

Koine/Common languages and dialects for official usage have of course existed
for as long as humans have cooperated, but the ability for these to be enforced
as “standard languages” only came about with the rise of states and
bureaucracy, an ability which, while often useful for promoting cooperation,
is often used to arbitrarily enforce a norm of the way only *certain* people of a
*certain* time spoke (almost always the oppressors) as being “superior”.

Factually however, there    is    no    such    thing    as    a    "better"    or    "higher" 
form    of    language. There has never been any metric by which to scientifically
judge such a thing. This claim has only been used, all to often, to put down,
shame, and devalue the literature and way of speaking of language or dialect
minorities, and to attempt to assimilate them into dominant cultures or political
groups.

So I would recommend caution in deciding what is an “appropriate amount of

prescriptivism”, and understand that.
Conclusions

To sum up, all I really want to say is that modern English “neopronouns” aren’t
“unholy creations of the snowflakes”, but a very legitimate and, to be perfectly
frank, normal change, that has occurred in many languages, many times.

But of course, as any phenomenon in language, their adoption, their usage, etc,
will all be influenced by the social pressures of the present and future. Perhaps
they shall die out, but this is doubtful in my opinion, considering their rapidly
expanding usage. Perhaps they shall remain confined to the realms of internet
forums or even enter literature?

I can’t say yet, but even if they never do, this doesn’t make them any less valid,
since certain slangs being confined to a minority community, such as Blacks in
the US, queer people, or even a profession, such as brothel workers, and so on,
have always existed too.

So I would implore you, to go out, and to ask neopronoun users themselves

these questions, to see what you can learn from them. I guarantee the
understanding, and potential data, that you gather will be invaluable.

Cheers～ ^^