Origin and spread of the personal pronoun 'they': La Estorie del Evangelie, a case study

There are few features of the English language that have traditionally epitomised the influence of Old Norse on English more than the 3pl. personal pronouns they, their, them. The modern-day forms derive from the þ-type 3pl. pronouns in þei(-), þai(-) and þe(-) that appeared in Middle English and replaced the Old English h-type pronouns hīe, hira, him. The traditional view holds that the Middle English þ-type pronouns derive from the Old Norse 3pl. pronouns þeir, þeira, þeim. Close examination of the early English orthographic and distributional textual evidence indicates that there is scope for a re-evaluation of the Norse influence on the development of English 3pl. pronouns (e.g. Ogura 2001; Cole 2018, forthc.). The present paper focuses on the 3pl. pronominal usage recorded in the seven manuscripts of the Middle English poem known as La estorie del evangelie. We explore how scribes from different dialectal areas responded to the (near-)categorical þ-type system of the early exemplars of Estorie. And equally, how scribes from the same dialectal area adapted (and possibly adopted) the different pronominal systems of their exemplars at a local level, and what light these processes shed on origin. We pay special attention to the mixed h-type and þ-type paradigms of the West and South-West Midlands. Our findings support the hypothesis that þ-type pronouns are the result of polygenesis, as opposed to the traditional etymological explanation based solely on language contact at the expense of native derivation