"I interviewed a developer yesterday." "Where they any good?"

Sounds a lot more natural than "Was he or she any good?"

How would you rephrase: "He requires access."

They require access would imply multiple people right?

In isolation, yes, but when you're actually using this sentence there will be context. "When you want to onboard a new developer, they will require access."

"There's a new person joining the team." "What do we need?" "They require access to the stack."

Both are obviously singular they.

Ah got it! So the solution is pretty much to prefix a short sentence to provide context that indicates that they is going to be used in a non-standard way, so instead of:

"They are at the door right now, please open it asap"

You'd say:

"Someone is visiting, they are at the door right now, please open it asap"

This indeed does not sound unnatural or misleading to me anymore.

(I know you'd probably just rephrase the second sentence but this is just and example)

"They are at the door right now, please open it asap" requires no count. It is fundamentally unambiguous in its phrasing, it could be 1 person or 50.

"They are at the door right now, please open it asap [and let a singular individual in]". If that bracketed portion is the intent, requires context. It implies a specific individual who you could identify by name or by a gendered pronoun if known (and unique in context) or description. Either way, you need to let the person you're speaking to know which "they" of the potentially many individuals at the door you want to permit in.

This context may have already been supplied. For instance, on visiting an office for an interview a name will already be supplied and the person (security, admin) doing the opening may already know the identity and that it is a singular person who is expected. In which case, "they", because of prior context, is entirely unambiguous again.

I find the whole “semantically singular, grammatically plural they” thing fascinating because it brings into European languages (granted, English is a pretty unusual one) an idea that I previously only encountered during a brief foray into Japanese:

Most of the time, either the number of the noun is clear from context or you are completely fine not knowing what it is.

“They are waiting at the door for you.” Is there one of them? Is there more? Who cares, the sentence covers both!

Granted, Japanese has syntactic gadgets that enable you to add that information in a natural way in cases where you actually do care, but it’s still surprising at first how much communication works without obsessively marking every noun for number. How do Japanese, Chinese, and Korean speakers communicate without grammatical number? The same way Russian speakers communicate without grammatical definiteness, or English speakers communicate without grammatical perfectiveness, or all of them communicate without grammatical clusivity, etc.: either they mark it explicitly or—in most cases—they can perfectly well do without. It’s technically ambiguous, but only in the way every other word that isn’t marked for every grammatical category found across human languages (i.e. every single word) is ambiguous.

(In case you were wondering why speakers of Slavic languages sometimes tend to overuse “some” and “this” in English, that’s why: those are the way their native languages, lacking obligatory articles, mark nouns for definiteness when it actually matters; the overuse is what happens when you teach articles as “these weird formal words you have to use according to these weird formal rules” without telling your students that they actually bear meaning.)

"Semantically singular, grammatically plural" is already very common in English due to singular "you".

It's probably just my non-native context/semi-translation messing with my understanding, if someone told me "they are at the door" I'd be like "They!?"

Disclaimer: I'm not a native speaker.

Why "they requires access" isn't fine?

It looks grammatically incorrect but the ambiguity is removed thanks to the "s" particle.

English already has similar irregularities in other contexts which seem to bother nobody.

i.e the sentence "If I were you, I'd do X and Y". The word "were" looks weird there but it solves a problem. Can't we treat "they" as singular in a similar manner?

Singular they is like plural you in English. Without context it’s hard to determine the intended count because the verb is conjugated the same way regardless of count. Unlike, say, Spanish or most Romance languages.

This can introduce ambiguity, but declining to use ancient (800 years, why are we debating it still?) inclusive phrasing because some people fail to create context for their pronouns is silly.

> Why "they requires access" isn't fine?

It just isn't.

When I was learning French I quickly learnt not to question why something is right or wrong. It's wrong because the natives say it's wrong. It's as simple as that.

I totally understand and kind of sympathize with that.

I just feel (citation needed) that there are more non-native English speakers than native ones and natives' opinions is no longer enough.

Regardless of count of native and non-native speakers, singular they is still 800+ years old in English. It is ambiguous without context around the potential count and it's unlikely the conjugation rules will change in the next few years to accommodate this. However, in English (and I suspect most languages) it's generally not common (or it is discouraged) to drop in a pronoun without sufficient context to identify the individual or group that it describes, which also includes count. So even if the verb conjugation remains ambiguous (with a phrase or sentence taken out of context), in context it should make sense so long as the person is semi-competent in communicating.

"They need access" - no context, ambiguous.

"They need access" while pointing towards an individual, unambiguous; while pointing toward a group of new students on the first day of school, unambiguous.

"They need access" in an email as a single line or a subject with no message body, completely ambiguous and will elicit a response of "Who needs access?" If it's part of a prior conversation chain that the recipient can recall, they'll give access to however many individuals they are aware of be it one or one hundred because it's unambiguous in the context (for them, but not for us).

Perhaps worth mentioning that "you" is "ambiguous" in exactly the same way: it's grammatically and historically plural but can now refer to either a single person or a group.

French and German also use a grammatically/historically plural form for polite "you". But Italian seems to use a feminine third-person pronoun for that purpose ...

You is historically plural?

I knew it could be applied to a group in certain cases, but only when referring the group as a single unit, really still singular. Or when speaking one-to-many, where each recipient is meant to hear you to refer to themselves, though the speaker spoke to a group.

"you 12 come with me" is really still referring to a single unit to me, the group, not the individuals. IE, it conveys no more meaning than saying "you come with me" where the object might be either a person or a group equally.

It's interesting, I don't think English has a way to distinguish "me singular" vs "me a member of a plural", other than by adding other words like "you all"

That is a pretty interesting idea. I love the idea that someone starting out with the desire to project their will on the rest of the world, becomes so successfull that they no longer own their own language. "If you didn't want other people to mess up your language, maybe you shouldn't have insisted that everyone else speak it?"

Context. Or “the <descriptor>“, like “the user requires access”.

“The user can change settings by selecting properties. Once there, they can opt out of silly debates.”

Is there any ambiguity? Pronouns belong in places where an identity can be, well, identified. Not standalone. Sans context we don’t even know who “he” is. If it’s a real person and not a hypothetical person, use their gendered pronoun if desired.

“Jtsummers needs access. His credentials can be verified by…”

It's not more confusing than addressing your male or female cousin. Language isn't always helping, but using "they" for everybody just seems like a natural fit.

This scenario is for a specific person and you would most probably use their name or you would still use he or she or their pronoun in context.

"This person requires access"?

I’d need to see the preceding sentence but probably not.

Have you ever come across the game "Guess Who?"

Do they have grey hair? Yes, they do.

Sounds entirely natural to me.

>Do they have grey hair? Yes, they do.

Yes the group of old man's have grey hair.

"Fin updated their profile picture" is what Facebook has used since forever if gender was not set. Did you ever notice it?

Yes it does. It’s been used that way for 800 years now.

I'm a native speaker too and while I think there are a few areas where it feels a little unnatural, for the most part it seems natural to my ears. Could be a dialect based thing for how it feels though.

Native speaker here. It definitely does sound natural when used in the singular. When a person uses it in the singular, they're generally aware of what it means :)

Replying to my own comment to address the backlash as I can't possibly reply to every one (my account has been throttled for well over a year at this point).

For a start I find it telling that my comment was downvoted to -4 instantly. How can you downvote someone for stating what they do or don't find natural in their own language? Do you think I'm lying? Maybe I should start making comments about what I find natural in French instead?

You've all given examples of contexts where you don't find it unnatural. I agree with s some of them, so let me correct my original comment: it doesn't always sound natural.

> "I interviewed a developer yesterday." "Were they any good?"

This sounds OK if the gender has not yet been mentioned, but as soon as it has been mentioned it would be unnatural to use "they".

> Do they have grey hair? Yes, they do.

Also OK, until the gender has been established, as above.

> "Fin updated their profile picture"

This sounds completely unnatural to me and yes, I have noticed it. This is the same usage as in the PR in question here.

I also find it unnatural when "they" is used as the subject of a sentence in singular, like "When they travelled to London, they drank tea". If that's a single person, it sounds really jarring.

I think it's probably to do with the verb conjugation rather than the pronoun. As a French speaker you probably understand that the verb is equally, if not more, important than the pronoun. In Spanish they don't even bother with pronouns, it's all about about the verb. Unfortunately "they is" sounds totally wrong to every native speaker, so you're stuck with "they are", which is used for plural.

> For a start I find it telling that my comment was downvoted to -4 instantly. How can you downvote someone for stating what they do or don't find natural in their own language? Do you think I'm lying? Maybe I should start making comments about what I find natural in French instead?

I don't think you're lying. I think you're unfamiliar with your native language. As a fellow native English speaker, singular they sounds perfectly natural to me and has appeared in a great deal of prose that I've read, and not just 21st century text.

Do you think the people who downvoted you are all non-native English speakers passing judgement on you?

Linguist here. There’s no right way to understand your own language. The language is what native speakers collectively think that the language is. If they (by the way, am I referring to op now or to the native speakers?) think that something sounds unnatural, then it is unnatural to them. You can’t be wrong about this, just as you can’t be wrong about whether it feels natural to hug someone you met five minutes ago.

Everything we as linguists can do is to say that x feels natural to this many people and unnatural to this many people. However, when writing something, if enough people think that something feels unnatural, maybe you should investigate if you can phrase things differently so that more people will accept it.

With regard to your question, it works either way so there's no particular ambiguity. But since pronouns usually go to the most recent appropriate person/group, and you had not yet referred to the OP explicitly, the "they" could refer to a subset of native speakers who find it unnatural which also happens to include the OP, or just to the OP given the broader context of the message. And either way your comment comes out meaning the same thing:

People feel what they feel and can't be wrong about what they feel (because it's feeling, not a rational thing).

I don't disagree with that in any way whatsoever. But it doesn't mean that the OP is fundamentally correct either. I find the phrase "he/she" to be awkward, ignoring whether it's inclusive or not (which it isn't). "He" is fundamentally gendered despite what many people want to believe and is even less inclusive (even if we assume only the male and female genders, it necessarily excludes half the population). Consequently, singular "they" ends up being the most natural way to express a non-gendered arbitrary person, especially given that English has an 800+ year tradition of using it in that sense.

Also linguist here. You're right that there's no right way to understand your language, but it's also the case that you need to take a speaker's self-report with a grain of salt.

That speaker has probably seen singular they countless times without raising an eyebrow, and probably used it themselves. They may report being uncomfortable with it when their attention is called to it, but that doesn't always reflect their actual usage.

You get a better understanding by analyzing a corpus than by asking people. And the corpus makes clear that a lot of people have been comfortable with singular they, for a long time. I've even seen examples of people decrying singular they in sentences using singular they.

The self-reports are also data that's informative to the linguist. But they need context to gain perspective, because they're not always identical to what the speaker generates or accepts.