Stan Carey at Sentence first posted A list of animals who:
The recent death of the great Jane Goodall brought me back to an old post about the use of who-pronouns with non-human animals, as in ‘swallows who flew past her window’, as opposed to ‘swallows that/which flew past her window’.
Goodall’s first scientific paper was returned to her with who replaced by which, and he or she replaced by it, in reference to chimpanzees. Goodall promptly reinstated her choice of pronouns, presumably seeing them as markers of the animals’ intrinsic value, and their substitution as an unwarranted moral demotion.¹ [¹ I learned about this incident from Gaëtanelle Gilquin and George M. Jacobs’s paper ‘Elephants Who Marry Mice are Very Unusual: The Use of the Relative Pronoun Who with Nonhuman Animals’. It has lots of data-informed commentary and is well worth reading if this topic interests you.]
Since then I’ve made note of other examples of animals who that I’ve read in books. This post compiles them in one place, where they form a kind of homemade menagerie of zoolinguistic solidarity.
There are sheep, ducks, cows, and many more, ending with ants, rats, and even trees (“As soon as the bright sunlight increases the rate of photosynthesis and stimulates growth, the buds of those who have shot up receive more sugar”). He ends with:
I’m sure my usage is inconsistent – it’s one of those grey areas in language that I find interesting. Maybe it’s something you’ve noticed in your own usage. In any case, it’s fun to see new animals join the who club (or the very important person club). All it needs now is some fungi and microbes.
Interesting stuff; I’m pretty sure I’ve come to use who for non-humans more and more in recent decades, and I think it’s a good development. (Not sure about the fungi, though.)
Early adopter: Dr. Seuss, in Horton Hears a Who?
Stan Carey refers to an earlier post of his which observes that _who_ “may also be used for animate entities with personality or the implication thereof, and this [sometimes] includes non-human animals.” That seems exactly right, and speakers/writers will obviously vary from each other (and maybe vary from themselves on prior and subsequent occasions …) as to whether they do or don’t wish to imply some personality in the case of a given animal in a given situation.
I just used the magic of Control-F to investigate Tolkien’s use of relative “who” in _The Hobbit_, and in addition to the more hominin-like non-humans like hobbits and dwarves et cetera (and also deprecated critters like goblins and trolls) he uses it with eagles, spiders, and dragons, or rather with specified individual examples of each of those.
imply some personality
personality? Or evidence of consciousness? (All threads are one, we’re back with cogito ergo sum.)
I’m relaxed using ‘who’ for higher-order mammals, including, say, dolphins. (I’m less than convinced about fungi or trees.)
Take, though, octopuses: clearly intelligent; clearly able to reason; personality? I’m not so sure. If they have a consciousness, it’s so alien, I don’t know how I would recognise it. (If an octopus could speak, we couldn’t understand him/her.)
“Wenn ein Löwe sprechen könnte, wir könnten ihn nicht verstehen,” — was Wittgenstein’s lion a ‘him’ or an ‘it’?.
Kusaal consistently uses the “human” gender pronouns, like o “he/she”, for “higher” animals, like cows or goats or dogs. Also for trees, at least, traditionally; the 1976 New Testament, for example, has
Tiig wela bigisid on a si’em.
tree fruits show.IMPERFECTIVE he.NOMINALISER be how
“The fruits of a tree show what he/she is.”
I’m saddened to report that the 2016 version goes
Tiig walaa bigisid lin an tisi’a.
tree fruits.LINKER show.IMPERFECTIVE it.NOMINALISER be tree.certain
“It is the fruits of a tree which show which tree it is.”
I blame texting.
Gatinha, a.k.a., Neuroticat, is a three-legged adoptee. She would demonstrate her opinion of being called an ‘it’ by puking on the nearest chair or carpet. Bandito, a deadgrass Chessie with diabolical golden eyes and a sweet disposition, weighed in at about nine and a half stone (according to the East Midlands Queen of the family) or 130+ lbs. in the Maine vernacular.
Before he adopted us, he may have used other pronouns, but after joining us he relinquished any claim to it-ism.
The rule of thumb here seems to be that named critters are who. Eg., Rupert the chicken, Basil the neighbor’s mutt, and Harald and Mrs. Harald, hummingbirds. Unnamed creatures are generally its.
The Royal Academy of the Language, Mid-coast chapter, has yet to opine.
Nouns referring to animals take the “human” m-/wa- class concords in Swahili. I’m not sure quite how far down the animacy scale this goes, but it includes birds, snakes and fish, so pretty far, anyway.
Mind you, the snake that bites Paul’s hand on Malta gets to be referred to as o “he/she” too, I see, even in the 2016 Kusaal Bible. The big fish that swallows Jonah does, too. It does come over as pretty animate.
When birdwatching, my spontaneous utterance at seeing a bird is notably often: “there’s somebody!”
“Wenn ein Löwe sprechen könnte, wir könnten ihn nicht verstehen,” — was Wittgenstein’s lion a ‘him’ or an ‘it’?
Only the English translation can tell you, because German doesn’t make that distinction. Neither does any other European language that I’m familiar with – but I’m not familiar with very many of them. Is English the only European language who does this?
‘That’ and ‘which’ aren’t quite the same here, though, are they? I can say ‘the man who drove the bus on Friday’ or ‘the man that drove the bus on Friday’, but not ‘the man which drove the bus on Friday’.
(Maybe if it’s plural – ‘the band which played at the concert on Friday’)
Wittgenstein’s point was that nobody could understand the lion. It’s odd that nobody wonders whether the lion could understand human speech. If it couldn’t, why worry what its preferred relative pronouns might be ?
@stu
It’s a given. The predator understands the prey. The prey does not understand the predator; otherwise the prey would avoid being eaten. Understanding is not the same as empathy; I suspect predators are not overendowed with empathy for their prey.
why worry what its [the lion’s — his/hers/theirs?] preferred relative pronouns might be ?
I’m not. I’m worried what were W’s preferred pronouns for the lion, in speculatively attributing him/her/them with the power of language.
I would think that, like cats in general, lions have long since concluded that human beings say nothing that could possibly be of any interest. Unlike dogs, cats have a thoroughly Wittgensteinian view of the possibility of meaningful communication between those of different Lebensformen.
The Anscombe/Hacker/Schulte translation has the all too prosaic “If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.” Whether W himself would have approved, one cannot say.
Do any sailors, who might use she for their ship or boat, also use who for her?
On the farm of my mom’s generation, the few milk cows had names and quirks, but not the barn cats, nor pigs (all dangerous and confined.)
Chickens had quirks too, some broody, some likeable, but I don’t recall names being used. How can you name something you’re eventually going to kill and eat?
In that last sentence, it would be horrid to substitute “someone” for “something.” This parallels the “who/which” thing.
@AntC: in German, lions are male, so it’s der Löwe and er. No reason to use a neuter pronoun. A somewhat similar problem exists only when the grammatical gender for a clearly gendered person is neutral (das Weib, das Mädchen “the woman, the girl”), where speakers often switch to the natural gender (sie) from the grammatical gender (es), if not immediately, then after the first reference or two. (I think we discussed cases like das Kind, das Baby somewhere on LH already.)
But if talking about an animal whose grammatical gender is neuter (e.g., das Kamel), people would continue to use neuter pronouns; if one wanted to underline the natural gender, one would have to specify der Kamelhengst / die Kamelstute or use gendered names like “Trevor” or “Stacey”.
@Jen in Edinburgh – We used to say “Our Father which art in heaven”, but even those of us who keep to the ‘old’ version now use “who”.
When birdwatching, my spontaneous utterance at seeing a bird is notably often: “there’s somebody!”
I don’t think I say that, but at the next moment I may say, “Who’s that?” or “Who are you?”
The other common shift in the Lord’s Prayer – even in the “archaic-sounding” phrasing that sticks to “thy” rather than “your” – is from the earlier “them that trespass against us” to more recent “those who trespass against us.” But maybe that bit of the older version doesn’t sound as odd to modern ears as “which art” does for a sufficiently high-on-the-animacy-scale referent. The google books ngram viewer shows the trendlines crossing and the “those who” version becoming more common circa 1908, but that’s in the “universal” corpus and the trendline crossing was significantly earlier than that in the “American” subcorpus but significantly later in the “British” subcorpus.
Obviously “he”/”she” correlate with “who”, and “it” with “that”; but what about a single animal of sufficient personhood but indeterminate sex(?/gender) ? I think “it” seems more likely than “they” (let alone “he or she”) even when paired with “who”.
That’s how it was on the farm that we used to visit when I were a little lad, belonging to a cousin of my father’s. When they started having beef cattle as well as dairy cattle the beef cows didn’t have names.
Nearly all other cats, certainly: anyone foolish enough to pet a tiger would be likely to end up as the tiger’s dinner. However, my understanding is that lions are the most social of cats, and do sometimes strike up friendly relations with people.
To my shame and embarrassment I tend to get confused between the great Jane Goodall and the great Diane Fossey.
As for pronouns, I would only use who or whom with an animal that was clearly being regarded as a person, and usually not even then.
As for my own pronouns, I accept any of he, her, hers, him, his, it, its, she, their, theirs, them, or they, whichever seems most appropriate.
However, my understanding is that lions are the most social of cats, and do sometimes strike up friendly relations with people.
Well, “friendly relations” doesn’t necessarily imply caring about what the other says. (Aside from perhaps noticing that certain vocalizations portend impending dinnertime.)
@mollymooly: but what about a single animal of sufficient personhood but indeterminate sex(?/gender) ?
Such an animal is often “he”. As I believe I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve even heard birders (mostly novices) refer to a bird as “he” even after they’ve heard, or I thought they heard, that it was female.
Well, “friendly relations” doesn’t necessarily imply caring about what the other says.
So much so that cheerful indifference to the details of what people say actually promotes friendly relations with them. There is no occasion to feel provoked. Not by words at least.
Obviously “he”/”she” correlate with “who”, and “it” with “that”; but what about a single animal of sufficient personhood but indeterminate sex(?/gender) ? I think “it” seems more likely than “they” (let alone “he or she”) even when paired with “who”
That used to be the case, but in my experience “they” has become very common for warm-blooded animals over a certain size.
When birdwatching, my spontaneous utterance at seeing a bird is notably often: “there’s somebody!”
I’m so used to saying that kind of thing to my partner, or referring to animals as people/folks, that I’ve sometimes said it to others in the wrong context and caused more than a little confusion. At least I usually remember not to use the word “bassotto” (dachshund) for everything from a snail to an elephant, which is another bad family habit.
That’s Dian Fossey, but I wouldn’t shame anyone for not remembering the spelling of Dian, since it’s a rare variant.
I think we discussed cases like das Kind, das Baby somewhere on LH already.
One recent discussion was the post on la victima in Spanish from May 2025.
And my favorite is the excellent exposition by marie-lucie on la sentinelle in French, and what it takes to switch the pronoun reference from elle to il.
Yes, excellent — I miss marie-lucie !
Not an animal but interesting gender switch anecdatum from 5 minutes ago; hardware store clerk searching for the matching replacement bulb, finally finds the right one: “That’s her. [Rings up on till] It’s three-fifty for that lad.”
Also el rehén is shifting from grammatical concord to natural as we speak. Or so I read. The Israeli hostages in Gaza were much in the news when I listened to RNE 5 a lot, which is why I looked it up. The RAE tells me usado también el masculino para referirse a una mujer.
(I thought I remembered that it was feminine concord originally, but the lurkers don’t seem to agree).
(Also the fascinating internal sandhi of Israel [i.ra.’el] with the trill. Every news reader did that).
Come to think of it, Kusaal kpi’im “corpse” is construed as animate. Probably because it can also just mean “dead person” generally, and one’s dead forebears (for example) are thought to be still around helping to protect the family.
Fun Mooré proverb, with the Mooré cognate kɩɩma:
Ra bas tɩ kɩɩm kẽ roogẽ tɩ f yaool n pag ye.
“Il ne faut pas attendre que le fantôme rentre dans la case avant de fermer.”
Sound advice.
my english usage isn’t all that consistent, but drifts more and more towards “who” for critters, plants, and geological elements (and some other “inanimate” things). yiddish doesn’t really fit these patterns – װאָס | vos and װעלכע | velkhe are conventionally translated “who”* and “that/which”, but don’t distinguish between people and others (װאָס is used in nominative and accusative; װעלכע in all three cases. there is, however, a third option in accusative and dative: װעמען | vemen (conventionally, “whom”), which is only used for “people” (saith dovid katz).
in my experience, the default is װאָס – whether “di froy vos zitst dortn” [the woman what’s sitting over there] or “der tish vos shteyt do” [the table what’s standing here], what are katz’s first two samples of relatives in nominative.
.
* in this context; as a question-word it is generally translated “what” (and contrasts with װער | ver, “who”).