An interesting linguistic phenomenon has been occurring at schools in Baltimore: the development of a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. The neologism is the pronoun Yo. It can apparently be used to describe both a he and a she. For example I could use the sentence ‘Yo reads my blog‘ to mean, ‘She reads my blog’, but I could also use it to mean ‘He reads my blog’. A comprehensive study has recently been done on the subject. An analysis of the phenomenon can be read at the Language Log.

Although use of the word Yo has apparently been going on since 2004, it’s still early days to know whether this phenomenon will stick. A potential spin-off from this development is the philosophical problem of language and meaning. Examples of this problem are the questions: does language have meaning? and how do I know what you mean when you say something? or how do I know that you really mean what I think you mean when you say something? The word Yo is a case in point. Obviously the speaker either means he or she, but without using a gender pronoun somewhere else in the sentence (such as Yo better eat her dinner), or without the speaker pointing to something, the listener has no way of knowing (without intuition or context) what the speaker means. Whether this exacerbates the philosophy of language is unknown at this point, but it gives us something to think about.

posted by rowanp at 5:23 pm & filed under culture, philosophy |