Yo, grammar girl here.

I have grammar news about the word yo this week.

Listen through to the end because you may be able to help a language researcher.

The grammar news is that Dr. Elaine Stokko from the School of Education at Johns Hopkins

University and her student Margaret Troyer have discovered that school children in Baltimore

are using this slang word yo as a gender-neutral singular pronoun.

Dr. Stokko was teaching a master's class at Johns Hopkins and it came out during a discussion

that several of the high school and middle school English teachers had noticed their students

using yo as a pronoun.

Often the students would be talking to another student, would point at a third person they

were referring to, and would say something like, yo through a thumbtack at me.

This may teachers think they were using yo to mean he or she instead of yo as you would

normally hear in phrases like yo mama.

To test the theories, Stokko and Troyer showed kids a cartoon with a goofy-looking person,

but the kids couldn't tell whether the person was male or female.

Then they asked the kids to write a slang caption for the cartoon.

Some of the kids wrote yo crazy instead of he or she crazy or they crazy.

Follow-up research showed that kids definitely intended yo to mean he or she.

They used yo as a pronoun.

The researchers found it was most common for kids to use yo in the subject position.

For example, yo wearing a new coat to point out someone wearing a new coat, but they

also used yo in the object position as in, I saw yo at school or look at yo.

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