IDENTITY ISSUES: Is ‘Yo’ the gender-neutral pronoun you’ve been looking for?

 JOHN MCWHORTER

I am in the middle of writing a book on pronouns in English. My focus this time out is on standard English rather than non-standard English, since one of my recent books was about Black English. However, I am struck that the most dynamic, “Who’da thunk it?” developments in pronouns are in the Englishes beyond the standard.

Indeed, I increasingly think that if we are to be a linguistically informed people, our education should include instruction in how non-standard varieties of English are often more complex than standard varieties. Although they are often presumed to be simpler — in a word, dumber — than standard English, the opposite is often true. Non-standard variations can be sophisticated solutions to the problems that inevitably reside in English, as in any language. One example I am thinking of is a relatively new and unheralded gender-neutral pronoun that has emerged in, of all places, Baltimore.

Gender-neutral pronouns are a thorny topic in English. In Finnish, for example, “han” is a genderless pronoun. Legions of languages have words like that. But in English, a truly accepted gender-neutral pronoun has been a holy grail for generations. In language varieties less policed, language change can happen the way it wants to, and new pronouns can come from the darnedest places. In the Black English of younger Black people in Baltimore, for instance, a new gender-neutral pronoun arose in the 2000s, as reported in an article by Elaine Stotko and Margaret Troyer. Of all things, the pronoun is “yo.”

Not “you,” but “yo.” Not “yo” in place of “your,” as in “yo books.” Not “yo” as in “Yo! I’m over here!” And not “yo” as in the one appended after a sentence to solicit agreement: “That sure was loud, yo!” This “yo” is a straightforward, gender-neutral third-person pronoun — basically “heesh,” but not as ridiculous sounding. “Yo was tuckin’ in his shirt!” is an example Stotko and Troyer documented. This “yo” did not mean “you,” because the reference was certainly not to someone tucking in someone else’s shirt. A female teacher was handing out papers, and someone remarked — not to the teacher herself — “Yo handin’ out papers.”

Wrap your head around it, and you can see this pronoun is pretty awesome. The interjection “Yo!” has been retooled, so that what started as a way of calling someone has become a way of calling out — i.e., pointing out — someone. The new “yo” means, in its way, “the one whom one ‘yo’s.” And it applies to no gender in particular. Baltimore Black English achieved what mainstream English never has: a gender-neutral pronoun that doesn’t force some other pronoun to moonlight in a new role.

Standard English has to settle for stretching limited resources, with “you” referring to any number of people and “they” increasingly called upon to do the same to an extent it never had to before. Modern English gives “you” and “they” a workout unknown in all but a few of the world’s languages. But if you want to know what human speech is typically like, with pronouns sharing duties among a good bunch of alternatives, you have to look to the non-standard Englishes — that is, the ones we are told are “not the real language.”

McWhorter is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University