A History of English Language

The nineteenth century and after 319
both sides of the Atlantic. In 1922 a group of Americans proposed that some plan of
cooperation between England and America be devised, and a committee was appointed in
England to consider the question. A few years later, at a meeting of the Royal Society of
Literature held in London, a number of English and American writers and scholars agreed
to form an “International Council for English” to consider the problems of the common
language of the English-speaking countries. 50 Such movements indicate that even if the
idea of a formal academy was no longer entertained, not all hope had been given up of
exercising some control over the development of the language.
233. Gender Issues and Linguistic Change.
The course of the history of English since the Renaissance has seen numerous conscious
attempts to reform the language in one way or another: to prohibit or encourage
borrowings, to prescribe matters of grammatical usage, to change the established
spellings of words, to found an academy with goals like these. More often than not the
reforms have failed and the language has developed in a seemingly inexorable way,
especially in the later periods when the efforts of any one person or group of persons
appear powerless against the language’s very vastness in geographical extent and number
of speakers. Since the 1970s the efforts to eliminate sexism from English, though having
met with resistance, have been more successful than most attempts at reform. Published
works from just a few years earlier now seem oddly dated in their use of what is now
seen as sexist language. Among the most obvious instances of the earlier usage are the
noun man and the masculine pronoun he, sometimes with man as the antecedent, both
words referring to men and women. Such usage was normal in the English language for
two centuries, although one interesting result of recent research is the demonstration that
grammarians since the eighteenth century, mostly male, have helped to bring about and
reinforce a usage that is socially biased and grammatically illogical.
Writers at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century have
generally found it easy to substitute people, person, or human beings for man and
mankind, though the problem of the pronoun has proved thornier. In the sentence,
“Everybody should button their coat,” males and females are treated equally, but the
plural pronoun their has as its antecedent the singular noun everybody. English does not
have a gender-neutral, or epicene, pronoun for persons. For more than a century
proposals have been suggested to remedy this lack including thon; e, es, em; heshe, hes,
hem; shey, shem, sheir, and many others. None of these has gained general accep-
50
See J.H.G.Grattan, “On Anglo-American Cultivation of Standard English,” Review of English
Studies, 3 (1927), 430–41, and Kemp Malone, “The International Council for English,” American
Speech, 3 (1928), 261–75. Nothing came of the proposal.