The use of they to replace he as the impersonal singular Pronoun in English fascinates me as it seems to me the only radical grammatical change to have taken place in my lifetime. The rules are clearly quite complex as I just realized that it is correct spoken English to say, “everyone believes they are more important than everyone else.” Any non-native speaker who can use “they” in this sense appropriately will get a prize. (Fair warning: the prize may be me saying, “good job.”)
As a non-native English speaker whose mother tongue is malayalam, I can attest that malayalam as well as a lot of other languages use the translation of ‘They’ as a singular pronoun.
It’s natural and obvious to me, so much so that, I end up using the same in English as well.
I’ll have to look into Malayalam then.
Does Malayalam have a systematic differentiation between singular and plural pronouns in general? And does it differentiate systematically between gender while using “they” as a singular pronoun?
If so, that would make Malayalam even more interesting for comparison with contemporary English.