Nounself pronoun

The category has one study behind it and a short list of dated mentions. Ehm Hjorth Miltersen of Aarhus Universitet published the study in 2016, in the first issue of the Journal of Language Works, and opened it by stating that the pronouns had not previously been examined at all. That paper is where the late-2013 date comes from and where the label first appears in print, which puts three years between the practice and the word for it.

Where the nounself pronoun record begins

Miltersen collected 134 questionnaire responses through Tumblr in the spring of 2015, together with three email interviews, and wrote the paper as a preliminary definition. The example given throughout is fae, declined across three of its forms in a single line: fae is nice, I saw faer, fae was hugging faer friend. Nobody on file is credited with coining the label nounself pronoun, and Miltersen's paper makes no such claim for itself.

The printed record after that is short, recent and split between two spellings, and the spellings do not appear in the same places.

Wiktionary treats the hyphenated form as an alternative spelling of the solid one and keeps the quotations for each on a separate page. The pattern in the table is that the study and the community handbook tend one way and the newspaper reports the other, with Ryle's book taking a third position by hyphenating the second half instead.

How a nounself pronoun is built

The construction takes a noun and runs it through the slots any pronoun fills, with the reflexive made by adding -self. Ezra Marcus, writing in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, gives bun and bunself and kitten and kittenself, and notes that the source noun can be an animal. Erickson-Schroth's Trans Bodies, Trans Selves records the sources people draw on as nature, fandom and other interests, and describes the results as highly individualised. Erin Ekins puts the mechanism in one line: a noun of the person's own choosing is adapted into a pronoun.

What separates these from the older coined sets is semantic rather than formal. Miltersen makes the point against the standard description of pronouns as semantically poor, words whose reference depends almost entirely on context. A nounself pronoun carries an explicit description of its referent, which is not something the pronoun system is usually asked to do. The paper cites Saxena's observation that pronouns undergo surprisingly rapid change for a closed word class, and offers the nounself sets as an instance of it.

The MSU Pride Community Centre handbook gives fae as its example and adds the association most often made about the sets: that they are common among people who identify with Xenogender terms, while remaining available to anybody. Miltersen's paper describes a second association, with Otherkin, an identity in which a person feels closely connected to a nonhuman and sometimes non-real entity, referred to as a kintype. Many of the respondents shared it.

What Miltersen found in the questionnaire

The hypothesis the study set out with was that the pronouns reflect parts of the identities of the people they refer to. The responses supported it and added something the hypothesis had not anticipated: the sets are used to discover and to perform an identity as well as to report one. Miltersen wrote that they let a person construct new ways to identify and to be perceived that are better matched to complex identities than the available alternatives.

Gender is one part of that and not the whole of it. The questionnaire asked which parts of an identity a respondent felt their chosen pronouns reflected, with species and kintype among the options alongside gender. One respondent described using pup and pupself to express a level of fun, happiness and excitement. Miltersen also went looking for whether the sets are used in ordinary conversation and offline, having first met them mainly as a subject of discussion about language rather than as language in use.

The paper sets the pronouns against the Non-binary vocabulary it defines alongside them, including Demigirl, Bigender and Agender, and against the observation that roughly thirty per cent of the languages in the World Atlas of Language Structures sample mark gender in their independent personal pronouns at all. English is one of them. Miltersen notes that a person's chosen pronouns cannot be inferred from appearance and do not follow from a gender identity either, and that a preference may rest on something entirely apart from gender.

How the press has written about nounself pronouns

The reception is part of the record and it is not uniform. Katrina Callaway's 2022 dissertation at the University of Georgia treats the sets as evidence in an argument about pronominal change, concluding that neopronouns generally and nounself pronouns in particular express something individual about the person selecting them. Erickson-Schroth's handbook and Ekins's guide for autistic LGBTQIA+ teenagers describe the construction without comment on whether it ought to exist.

Newspaper coverage has taken a different line, and the clearest instance is one of the quotations Wiktionary itself carries. Ewan Somerville's report in The Sunday Telegraph of 6 February 2022 concerns a Bristol University guide, describes it as lecturing staff, sets feline beside male and female in its opening words, and puts catgender inside quotation marks. The passage quoted from the guide itself is a description of noun-self pronouns as used by xenic individuals whose gender does not fit the Western human binary of gender alignments.

Wiktionary's own gloss carries a quieter judgement in the phrase nonce word, a lexicographer's term for a coinage made for one occasion, sitting beside in-group identifier in the same definition. Miltersen's paper closes on a section given over to attitudes towards the pronouns and to their future, and what that section concludes is not in the material on file for this entry.