ADRIAN QUINTERO is a transgender person with strong feelings about pronouns. “Our language really needs words to acknowledge folks who do not feel included in the gender binary,” says Quintero, who uses the pronouns “ze” (or “zie”) and “hir”, because “they have the freedom to mean something other than, or in addition to, male and female”.
Quintero’s mother, Elaine Stotko, shares this interest. A linguistics expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, she was fascinated when in 2004 a teacher in her Linguistics for Teachers class asked, “Have you ever heard kids using ‘yo’ when they mean he or she?”
About half the teachers taking the course had also heard “yo” used in this way, leading Stotko and Margaret Troyer (one of the teachers) to research this development, which they have now documented in the linguistics journal American Speech, ).
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They found that from at least 2004 to the present day, middle-school and high-school students in Baltimore have been using “yo” as a gender-neutral personal pronoun in sentences such as: “Yo put his foot up” and “Yo looks like a freak”.
“The lack of a gender-neutral personal pronoun in English has bothered people for at least two centuries”
The lack of gender-neutral substitutes for “he”/”she” and “his”/”her” has bothered people for at least two centuries, and “zie” and “hir” are just two of many invented words, including “ter”, “ip” and “thon”. If such words are not familiar, it is because they – like all attempts to coin a gender-neutral personal pronoun – have failed miserably.
Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has written extensively about this history of failure, says the emergence of “yo” is remarkable because it seems to be a spontaneous grass-roots phenomenon. “Most of the gender-neutral pronouns are artificial coinages that are then marketed – unsuccessfully – to users,” he says.
To make their case, Stotko and Troyer had to distinguish this new use of “yo” from interjections, such as “Yo, Adrian!”, and abbreviations of “you” or “your”, such as “Yo mama”. As well as listening for spontaneous uses of the word, they asked students to fill in cartoon captions, judge the authenticity of sentences, and make up conversations.
Both researchers agree that a sentence-translating exercise produced compelling results. “They translated yo as he/she pretty consistently,” says Troyer. “This showed me that students are not only using a new slang word because it’s cool; they are actually aware of the meaning of what they are saying.”
Whether “yo” catches on more widely, even among people who support gender-neutral language, remains an open question. “It sounds crass and disrespectful,” says feminist scholar Brenda Wrigley. “It is something a younger person would shout down the street as a greeting, but not something I’d like to see used in writing.”
While the prospects of “yo” being accepted into the established family of pronouns appear slim, Baron doesn’t rule it out. “All it takes is a way to break out of the narrow range of use into the broader community of speakers, and while that’s not likely, it could happen.”
