Apple's new personalized pronoun feature is pretty neat
With the release of iOS 17, macOS Ventura 14, and iPadOS 17, Apple now allows users to add pronouns to contact cards. The long-awaited feature is implemented in a creative way.
Last year, Apple announced that users would be receiving a long-awaited feature: the ability to add pronouns to contacts in the Phone and Contacts apps. While I first downloaded iOS 17 in September, I only recently tried adding pronouns to a contact - and I was pleasantly surprised with how Apple implemented the feature.
My assumption at the time was that Apple was simply adding an optional blank text box when editing a contact card. In other words, a probably-good addition but ultimately unimpressive. But I was wrong.
For users running iOS 17, iPadOS 17, or macOS Sonoma 14 or higher, a section labeled pronouns now appears when editing a contact card in the Contacts app, or within the Phone app on iPhone. Tapping on the field opens a personalized pronouns popup, allowing users to choose for which language they wish to add pronouns.
The ability to add pronouns to contacts was billed by Apple as:
Add Pronouns. Contact cards include a field for entering pronouns. Pronouns are stored on device and are not shared.
Adding pronouns this way is easy enough. If the device language is set to English, three text boxes appear with sample sentences underneath each one to demonstrate the use case of each pronoun:
Yesterday, she went outside.
I went with her.
The idea was hers.
As you input text into each text box, the sample sentence automatically updates with the pronoun that you entered. For example, if I type “he” into the first text box, its corresponding sample sentence immediately changes:
Yesterday, he went outside.
Not just that, but the other two boxes are auto-filled what what the system assumes I will type next - in this case, “him” and “his.” The sample sentences also update as well:
I went with him.
The idea was his.
To be clear, the system allows users to input whatever pronouns they want. Autofill just saves time if you are using a pronoun scheme that it recognizes.
Designing the user interface in this manner is smart, as it avoids using technical grammar terms. Asking users to input “third-person singular nominative pronoun,” “third-person singular objective pronoun,” and “third-person single possessive pronoun” would be drastically less accessible.
No one should be surprised to know “he,” “she,” and “they” included as auto-fill options. But I was interested to see if neopronouns were also included.1 I experimented using neopronouns from a list on the website of the Human Rights Campaign, and autocomplete was able to fill in the blanks on all of them.2 On the other hand, when I entered letters not widely recognized as a neopronoun, the other text boxes remained empty.
Apple also seemingly took steps to push back against transphobic trolls. Mean-spirited bigots have attempted to mock transgender and non-binary people by disingenuously claiming long words or rude phrases as their preferred pronouns. For example, Texas Senator Ted Cruz told a group of students that his pronoun is “Kiss My Ass.” Unfortunately for Cruz, Apple applies a 10-character limit for pronouns. (Sorry, Ted! Perhaps some time on Twitter or a vacation in Cancún might make you feel better.)
The personalized pronoun feature also works with a number of different languages from across the globe,3 and the number of text fields expands depending on the number of different pronouns that a language utilizes. For example: French and Korean have only one text box, traditional Chinese and Hebrew have two, Danish and English have three, and German has four. My limited language skills only permit me to personally verify that the English, Korean,4 and French options work as expected; I have no reason to suspect that the other languages’ do not.
For the privacy-minded among us, fear not - Apple has you covered:
Pronouns are only used on your devices by supported Apple apps. They are not shared with Apple or third-party developers.5
The wording here is a bit different than the wording on Apple’s initial iOS 17 feature set, which stated: “Pronouns are stored on device and are not shared.” Why the change? In testing this feature, I found that pronouns sync across devices on the same account, so strictly-speaking that do not stay “on device.”
In any case, I am not sure to what “supported Apple apps” refers. I spent some time digging through various Apple apps to find no instances of a user’s pronouns affecting in-app dialog or functionality. A commenter at 9to5Mac speculates that these could be used for personalization in the future:
It's possible that Apple might start using pronouns in the future when sharing, for things like...
NameDrop - "Blake would like to share his contact information with you"
Location Sharing - "Avery isn't sharing her location with you"
Check In - "Cameron has not responded to Check In notifications. Their last location was…"
But for the time being, the ability to add pronouns to contact cards is purely informational in nature. While not the most flashy feature, Apple has clearly put some degree of thought into implementing it well. It will be interesting to see how future software iterations build upon this foundation.
I am not here to debate the validity of using neopronouns, the usage of which dates back centuries.
Given that I do not personally use neopronouns for myself, there may be some nuances of Apple’s usage of them. I would be interested to hear from people who use neopronouns if this is the case.
At the time of writing, the feature is available in Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
Relative to English, Korean uses pronouns to refer to people much less frequently. “Geu” (그) is a singular gender neutral pronoun. But in response to a need to translate from languages that have gender-specific pronouns, “geu-nyeo” (그녀) began to be used as a singular pronoun for women. Although using “geu” in a gender neutral manner is still correct, it is now mostly used for men.
Could this run afoul of European Union anti-monopoly guidelines?