Language change in L2 academic writing: The case of epicene pronouns

Abstract

Abstract With the increasing demand for gender-fair language, an important issue to take into consideration in academic writing is the use of so-called epicene pronouns, i.e. singular personal pronouns unspecified for gender. Yet, little research has focused on how L2 English academic writers use these pronouns. The present study examines the use of epicene pronouns since the 1970s in L2 academic writing and analyses their current use, starting from 2010. The data originate from two corpora with academic papers written by Swedish-speaking university students of English: (1) the Finland-Swedish BATMAT corpus, which is used to extract diachronic data, and (2) the Swedish subset of the Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase, VESPA-SE, which adds to the data of current use. The results show that although the use of generic he has decreased noticeably since the 1970s, there is considerable variation in and between the texts from the 2010s. Such variation is indicative of a language change that is still very much in progress. The findings also suggest that singular they is establishing itself as a third-person singular pronoun in L2 academic writing since this pronoun is used frequently with all types of epicene antecedents in the data of current use.