Social workers cannot be cheap

The view from West Germanic

Abstract

Pronouns are a core subsystem of natural language morphology, as well as a site of significant metalinguistic reflection and identity formation. We describe a preference for anti-economy under conditions of politeness and gender affirmation in three West Germanic languages: German, Dutch, and English. Specifically, we compare the anti-syncretic behaviour of Sie in Central Bavarian; the unique agreement patterns of U and the mixing of die and hen in Dutch; and microvariation in the use of they as a gender-affirming form and as a morphological default form in English. What emerges from this juxtaposition is the observation that social work—that is, the expression of marked social and pragmatic meaning—is consistently correlated with phonological, inflectional, paradigmatic, and/or orthographic complexity, and that this correlation is functionally motivated, as the effort to maintain and produce this complexity is iconic of the respectful meaning.