Q&A: “do they pronouns work like plural or singular?”

anonymous said:

Hi sorry to bother you, english is not my first language and i always get confused, do they pronouns work like plural or singular? I mean talking about a nb person u say “they is very pretty” or “they are very pretty”?

not a problem, anon. 🙂

even when ‘they’ is used to talk about a single person, it is still used in almost the exact same way as it would be used to talk about multiple people. in other words, it is grammatically plural.

subjective: they are very pretty.
objective: i hugged them.
possessive determiner: their smile makes me happy.
possessive pronoun: the choice is theirs.
reflexive: they are proud of themself.*

* the only difference is that the reflexive form of plural ‘they’ is ‘themselves’ (eg. ‘they are proud of themselves’). some people use ‘themselves’ even for singular ‘they’ when talking about a single person, but i prefer ‘themself’.

hope this helps.