Animacy

Animacy is a grammatical and semantic principle expressed in language based on how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. Widely expressed, animacy is one of the most elementary principles in languages around the globe and is a distinction acquired as early as six months of age.

Concepts of animacy constantly vary beyond a simple animate and inanimate binary; many languages function off of a hierarchical General Animacy Scale that ranks animacy as a "matter of gradience." Typically (with some variation of order and of where the cutoff for animacy occurs), the scale ranks humans above animals, then plants, natural forces, concrete objects, and abstract objects, in that order. In referring to humans, this scale contains a hierarchy of persons, ranking the first and second person pronouns above the third person, partly a product of empathy, involving the speaker and interlocutor. Additionally, the hierarchy tends to place singular persons over plural (as seen in the heavy difference between "I regret to inform you" and "We regret to inform you"), but it carries exceptions, such as thousands of people signing a petition.

The distinction between he, she, and other personal pronouns, on one hand, and it, on the other hand is a distinction in animacy in English and in many Indo-European languages. The same can be said about distinction between who and what. Some languages, such as Turkish, Spoken Finnish and Spanish do not distinguish between s/he and it. In Finnish, there is a distinction in animacy between "he/she" and "it", but in Spoken Finnish, se can mean "he/she". English shows a similar lack of distinction between they animate and they inanimate in the plural but, as shown above, it has such a distinction in the singular.

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