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ELT Journal 1994 48(2):173-178; doi:10.1093/elt/48.2.173
© 1994 by Oxford University Press
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The politics of pronouns

Alastair Pennycook

currently a lecturer in the English Centre at the University of Hong Kong. He has previously taught in Canada, China, Japan, Germany, and the UK. Current interests include critical pedagogy, English and colonial history, and cultural and political implications of the global spread of English.

In this article, I suggest that in reacting against the prescriptivism of various language purists, applied linguistics has often opted for a rather bland descriptivism, which tends to assume the existence of an unproblematic world that is neatly referenced by words in a language. Here, I discuss pronouns and argue that they are in fact very complex and political words, always raising difficult issues of who is being represented. There is, therefore, never an unproblematic ‘we’ or ‘you’ or ‘they’ or ‘I’ or ‘he/she’.


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