(Un)democratic Epicene Pronouns in Asian Englishes: A Register Approach

Abstract

The search for gender equality in language use is one of the most frequently cited cases of linguistic democratization (e.g., Farrelly & Seoane 2012:394). At the grammatical level, this process implies, for example, that pronouns such as generic he used with epicene antecedents are being replaced by singular they or by combined he or she, at least in inner-circle varieties of English. However, outer-circle varieties remain underexplored in this regard. For this reason, this paper analyzes three Asian English varieties, namely Hong Kong English (HKE), Indian English (IndE), and Singapore English (SgE), based on the relevant ICE corpora. More than 58,000 examples were retrieved from the corpora and manually filtered, resulting in 2120 tokens of epicene pronouns. The results show a very different picture for each variety. While overall HKE shows a high preference for the more democratic options they and he or she, IndE and SgE exhibit different patterns. IndE shows singular they in speech, but it is almost non-existent in writing, while in SgE there is a sharp contrast between the most spontaneous spoken register and all other registers. After testing different hypotheses, the findings are explained in socio-cultural terms, as a result of democratization possibly related to women’s movements in those territories.