My English pronouns are:

• Nominative/Subjective: dey
• Accusative/Objective: dem
• Genitive/Possessive: deir
• Reflexive: demself

Yes you read that correctly! It’s just like the set of third person plural pronoun in English (nominative ‘they’) that is also frequently used to refer to singular people, except that instead of each beginning with ‘th-‘, they begin with ‘d-‘.

“Why do dey do this?” you ask? Well my answer would be because they’re my pronouns and I can! But why these specifically? It’s a shoutout to the variety of English I grew up speaking which I occasionally still speak. I grew up in New Orleans, and a significant portion of my family are Cajuns (French-speaking settlers who were displaced to Louisiana from Acadia in modern day Nova Scotia, Canada) a combination of lots of New Orleans English with a little bit of Cajun English. In both of these varieties of English, there is little to no distinction between the sounds spelled ‘d’ (as in ‘dog’) and ‘th’ (as in ‘them’). Most speakers of these varieties instead pronounce this ‘th’ sound, called an interdental fricative and transcribed as [ð] in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the system linguists use to write any sound from any language, very similar, if not identical, to the ‘d’ sound ([d] in IPA). This is because interdental fricatives are quite a peculiar and rare sound among languages of the world, and languages often shift away from including them in their inventories of consonants. Thus, for many words spelled with ‘th’, including the ‘they’ pronoun set, New Orleanians and Cajuns pronounce them like ‘d’, giving the ‘dey’ pronoun set. Other words this frequent occurs in include:

• the
• this
• that
• those
• weather (How’s da weader in New Orleans? Probably rainy.)
• smooth (Da streets ain’t smood in New Orleans. Prolly cause all dat rain).

There are many native and non-native varieties of English that do this besides New Orleanians and Cajuns. Some speakers of those and these varieties do a similar pattern for another sound we write with ‘th’ [θ], turning it into ‘t’ [t]. The difference here is that this sound does not involve vibration in the vocal folds: it’s unvoiced! So when speakers turn this theta sound into a stop consonant, they theta-stop it to [t]! This occurs in words like the following:

• think
• thigh
• healthy
• with

In any case, this sound change from [ð] to [d] (eth-stopping) is the reason why the fans of the New Orleans Saints National Football League Team are called “Who Dat Nation”. Dey’re aksin’ who dat say dey gon beat dem Saints. (Aks instead of ask is another indicator of a New Orleans English variety, as you can hear in the song linked below, along with many of these [ð]s becoming [d]s!)

But dey’s my pronouns, yeah! Thank you for reading this little blurb. I should note that I’m perfectly happy being referred to with [ð] in the pronouns instead of the [d] that I indicate here. If that’s a possibility in your variety of English, awesome! It isn’t in my native dialect and that’s cool too!

Mis pronombres y morfemas de concordancia en español son:

• Sujeto/nominativo: elle
• Objeto directo/acusativo: le
• Objeto indirecto/dativo: le
• Morfema de concordancia para sustantivos y adjetivos: -e