Linguist Observes a Trend: singular He/She/Yo

... with "yo" being a singular gender-neutral alternative to "they".  

John McWhorter in the NYT:

[I]n language varieties less policed, language change can happen the way it wants to, and new pronouns can come from the darnedest places. 

In the Black English of younger Black people in Baltimore, for instance, a new gender-neutral pronoun arose in the 2000s: “yo.”  Not “you,” but “yo.”  Not “yo” in place of “your,” as in “yo books.” Not “yo” as in “Yo! I’m over here!” And not “yo” as in the one appended after a sentence to solicit agreement: “That sure was loud, yo!”  

This “yo” is a straightforward, gender-neutral third-person pronoun — basically “heesh,” [ed.note: He/She combo possessive] but not as ridiculous sounding. ...

The interjection “Yo!” has been retooled, so that what started as a way of calling someone has become a way of calling out — i.e., pointing out — someone. ...Baltimore Black English achieved what mainstream English never has: a gender-neutral pronoun that doesn’t force some other pronoun to moonlight in a new role.  Standard English’s inventory of pronouns is actually rather impoverished compared to many nonstandard Englishes. ...

Standard language unites us. But with nonstandard language, nothing — no dictionaries, no tut-tutting by experts — pulls it back from doing what it wants to do. 

It tends to be built out compared to standard language, “buff” as it were. It should be common knowledge that such variations are of interest not merely because of the cultures they represent but also because of their sheer grammatical intricacy.  

Standard English has to settle for stretching limited resources, with “you” referring to any number of people and “they” increasingly called upon to do the same to an extent it never had to before. 

Modern English gives “you” and “they” a workout unknown in all but a few of the world’s languages. But if you want to know what human speech is typically like, with pronouns sharing duties among a good bunch of alternatives, you have to look to the nonstandard Englishes — that is, the ones we are told are “not the real language.”