Diachronic Shifts in Gendered Pronoun Usage in English Fiction (1900–2023): A 200-Million-Word Corpus-Based Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

This study examines diachronic shifts in gender pronoun usage in English fiction corpora over the period 1900–2023, focusing on changes in the frequency, distribution, and collocational patterns of gendered and gender-neutral pronouns. The analysis covers traditional masculine and feminine pronouns (he/him/his, she/her/hers) as well as emerging gender-neutral forms, particularly singular they and selected neopronouns. A 200-million-word diachronic fiction corpus was constructed using data from Project Gutenberg and the Contemporary Fiction Archive, enabling systematic tracking of linguistic change across more than a century of English literary production. The study investigates pronoun frequency ratios, pronoun–antecedent alignment patterns, and the evolving collocational environments associated with singular they and other non-binary reference forms. The results confirm the historical dominance of masculine generic pronouns (he/him) in early twentieth-century fiction, followed by a gradual but substantial decline beginning in the mid- to late twentieth century. This decline is accompanied by a marked increase in the use of she/her pronouns from the 1960s through the early 2000s, reflecting broader sociocultural shifts in gender representation. Most notably, the data reveal a rapid and accelerating rise in the use of singular they in both generic and specific referential contexts in the twenty-first century. Distributional semantic analysis further demonstrates significant restructuring of collocational environments across pronoun categories, indicating changing patterns of gendered reference and discourse construction in fiction over time. The findings contribute to diachronic corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics of gender, and research on language ideological change, highlighting how grammatical systems reflect evolving social understandings of gender identity and inclusivity in written discourse.