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they are (third-person plural, and third-person singular) Other verbs in English take the suffix -s to mark the present tense third person singular, excluding singular 'they'. In many languages, such as French , the verb in any given tense takes a different suffix for any of the various combinations of person and number of the subject.
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and ...
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language discusses the prescriptivist argument that they is a plural pronoun and that the use of they with a singular "antecedent" therefore violates the rule of agreement between antecedent and pronoun, but takes the view that they, though primarily plural, can also be singular in a secondary extended sense ...
Examples of such languages include French, where the singular tu is used only for familiars, the plural vous being used as a singular in other cases (Russian follows a similar pattern); German, where the third-person plural sie (capitalized as Sie) is used as both singular and plural in the second person in non-familiar uses; and Polish, where ...
Old English had a single third-person pronoun hē, which had both singular and plural forms, and they wasn't among them. In or about the start of the 13th century, they was imported from a Scandinavian source (Old Norse þeir, Old Danish, Old Swedish þer, þair), in which it was a masculine plural demonstrative pronoun.
The first person plural form and pronoun (nous) are now usually replaced by the pronoun on (literally: "one") and a third person singular verb form in Modern French. Thus, nous travaillons (formal) becomes on travaille. In most verbs from the other conjugations, each person in the plural can be distinguished among themselves and from the ...
An archaic set of second-person pronouns used for singular reference is thou, thee, thyself, thy, thine, which are still used in religious services and can be seen in older works, such as Shakespeare's—in such texts, ye and the you set of pronouns are used for plural reference, or with singular reference as a formal V-form. [7]
The copular verb be has multiple irregular forms in the present tense: am for first person singular (which together with the subject pronoun is often contracted to I'm), is for third person singular (often contracted to 's), and are for plural and second person (often contracted to 're chiefly after the pronouns you, we, they).