Singular ’they’ / Practice English with Paul

Click here to find my unique posts on the English language: Singular ’they’ Hello my friends and welcome to Practice English with Paul. Today it’s grammar; it is the singular ‘they’. Now this is a mistake many of my students have made over the years in their essays especially at FCE, even surprisingly sometimes, CAE. You should not be making this kind of mistake at CAE. Now we know the word ‘they’ the pronoun and it is followed by a plural verb. They are…. They like….. They were…. But sometimes we use the pronoun ‘they’ with a singular noun. Now let’s have a look at how this works, so we can avoid making mistakes in the future. They/them/their. We use them after nouns of unidentified people or a job whose role is a man or a woman and there is no way of knowing if that role is for a man or a woman. Now if you look at German or if you know German, German has suffixes belonging to their roles that tell you that job is of man or of a woman. Lehrer – lehrerin. English