German

Middle English

Personal pronoun

Germanic languages

Plural

Old English

History

Philosophy

Subject pronoun

Old Norse

Demonstrative

Linguistics

Third person

Diachronica

It is commonly held that Present-Day English they, their, them are not descended from Old English but derive from the Old Norse third-person plural pronouns þeir, þeira, þeim . This paper argues that the early northern English orthographic and distributional textual evidence agrees with an internal trajectory for the ‘þ-’ type personal pronouns in the North and indicates an origin in the Old English demonstratives þā, þāra, þām . The Northern Middle English third-person plural pronominal system was the result of the reanalysis from demonstrative to personal pronoun that is common cross-linguistically in Germanic and non-Germanic languages alike.

A native origin for Present-Day English<i>they, their, them</i>

A native origin for Present-Day Englishthey, their, them