Singular they Becoming even more Singular: The themselves/themself Variation on Reddit

The pronoun they has seen increased attention and usage as a specific, sometimes non-binary-gendered, third-person pronoun in recent years. It has also begun to morphologically agree in number in the shape of the novel reflexive form themself . Social media users who declare their pronouns are the most plausible to use innovative pronoun forms and re-analyze the reflexive of they as number-sensitive based on their evident pronoun-awareness. In this study, I examine the use of themself by comparing such pronoun-declaring users on Reddit to two baselines, one composed of their peers in subreddit communities and the other being the general Reddit population. These Pronoun Declarers are represented with a novel corpus of 3M+ comments spanning from 2012 until 2021, with their counterparts sampled to ensure comparability in size and distribution. Samples are annotated and extrapolated to obtain estimates about the actual usage. Results indicate that themself usage has indeed increased in recent years, with the Pronoun Declarers and their peers using it more frequently than average. While their use patterns show expected sensitivity to number and specificity, it is still used less frequently than themselves for any antecedent, indicating that the potential change towards a number-sensitive reflexive of they is still emergent and sensitive to social conditioning. Still, this study may inform developers of language technology applications, authors of style guides, language educators, and anyone more generally concerned with inclusive language – themself is not a grammatical error but rather a novel and productive means to mark gender neutrality.