Can you please, pretty-please do a "3 linguistics papers to read" about neopronouns? I'd love to get some academic perspectives on them! :)
Ooh, yes, I can do this!
Three papers to read about neopronouns
The first one I'm linking is by Em Miltersen from 2016, which I am highlighting because the data comes specifically from tumblr!
Miltersen, E. H. (2016). Nounself pronouns: 3rd person personal pronouns as identity expression. Journal of Language Works-Sprogvidenskabeligt Studentertidsskrift, 1(1), 37-62. Open access to the paper here
Next, a very short paper by Rose et al., 2023, which is just looking at whether people even find neopronouns acceptable / grammatical:
Rose, E., Winig, M., Nash, J., Roepke, K., & Conrod, K. (2023). Variation in acceptability of neologistic English pronouns. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 8(1), 5526-5526. Open access paper is here
And then finally, I'd recommend this super cool paper by Laura Hekanaho, 2022, looking at the metalinguistic commentary and ways people talk about neopronouns - overlaps a bit with Rose et al.'s paper, but goes into much greater depth:
Hekanaho, L. (2022). A thematic analysis of attitudes towards English nonbinary pronouns. Journal of language and sexuality, 11(2), 190-216. Author's copy of the paper here
One thing about neopronouns is that there's comparatively little linguistics research published about them, and what does exist is very focused on English. Part of this is because the ways neopronouns are cropping up in English speech communities (especially online) are different than in other language communities, and the other part of the reason is that they're just super rare -- best estimates of how many people use neopronouns are very very low (the US Trans Census and the Gender Census report numbers <10%, and that's out of only trans people), and their appearance in every day language appears to be very rare.
What this means (frustratingly! and I hope this is changing!) is that at best neopronouns are mentioned in footnotes of linguistics articles and books about other stuff. There's also Dennis Baron's 2020 book, What's Your Pronoun, which is a really thorough documentation of historical attempts to coin gender-neutral pronouns in English... but Baron kind of comes to the conclusion that singular 'they' has 'won' the competition, and that none of the neopronouns he tracks have become mainstream.
Anyways, my personal opinion as a linguist is that I get frustrated with linguists who dismiss neopronouns because they're rare. Just because something's rare doesn't mean it's not a part of the language, and therefore a real part of the phenomenon we've decided to study! Devil's hole pupfish of english, tbh.
(Previous "3 papers to read" post was "3 papers to read about singular 'they'." If you like these posts, you can request a topic in linguistics and I'll do my best to recommend 3 open-access published papers to read!)
