The book's title tells us exactly the subject of Pieter Siemund's abiding and ambitious preoccupation, a phenomenon that is as interesting as it is baffling. Why do speakers of many dialects of English use he or she for artefacts, machines, trees and plants? Unfortunately, many questions remain, even despite the author's painstaking analyses of what look like anomalies in pronominal gender agreements across a range of dialects – at least from the perspective of present-day formal standard English.

Perhaps because we all know what the basic gender system is for pronominal agreement in modern standard English, we have to wait for chapter 8 for this to be conventionally set out before us. The author seems keener to survey regional variation, beginning with South-west English (chapter 2). It soon becomes clear, however, that the data from whatever variety is isolated are not actually his own. The book in essence is a summary, generously supplied with quotations but rather repetitive, of the studies he has been able to find that have appeared over the last hundred years or so: of the West Somerset dialect (1886); American English (1979); Tasmanian Vernacular English (1990s); and Newfoundland English (2004). Other studies, however carefully re-presented, raise issues of register comparability on the one hand, and factors not really discussed generally, on the other. So the studies of American fiction (1927/8) and of American children's fiction (1980) prompt questions of literariness and conventionality: of poetic personification and cultural stereotyping. And what is the relation, if any, between the system of pronominal gender in regional varieties, and informal spoken English generally? Moreover, if the databases range from 1886, the unasked question is surely to do with language change: how resilient have the pronominal usages described been?

Given the wide global scope of the dialects surveyed, and the crosslinguistic summary of the gender systems of languages as exotic as Nama, Wintu, Cree and Zande (simply there as a frame of reference), it is rather a pity that the author's interest is not really historical. He states quite crisply (p. 9) that the ‘development – or rather decline – of the English gender system is reasonably clear’; but then admits (p. 10) that it is ‘by no means straightforward’ to describe how the process of simplification took place. But if, as he also says, the use of he and she for inanimates is ‘a characteristic of all, or at least most’ of the dialects of Great Britain (p. 23), how did this arise; and how does it fit in with the development of the gender system since Old English? With the gradual breakdown of this system, it is plausible that communities of speakers were free to establish their own conventions for pronominal reference to nonhuman entities. ‘Personification’ is too general a label to cover what seem to be quite complex analogical hierarchies of salience and forms of gender symbolism.

The author's own main interest, however, and his own means of trying to tie so many disparate varieties together, is his theory of ‘individuation’, which is repeatedly presented to us. Based on the well-known concept of an ‘animacy hierarchy’, his thesis is that pronominal gender crucially depends on the degree of individuation of the entities referred to, or the degree of ‘countableness’ versus ‘mass’. However, while this does seem systematic for some varieties, it is hardly generalisable across varieties, despite his apparent belief to the contrary (p. 3). In any case, there is certainly evidence from the Survey of English Dialects that he- and she-forms can denote non-individuated items such as gravy, porridge and toothache. Moreover, a simple count/mass distinction does not help us to understand why she rather than he may be preferred for one countable object (e.g. a hand-tool) rather than another; or why the same object can be referred to by he and she (p. 91). And why should a speaker be ‘uncertain’ whether to use he or it? (p. 38). I may have missed something, but it does not appear clear to me how feminine pronouns are accounted for in Newfoundland English (p. 75), or Australian English (p. 78).

The general problem with the author's espousal of the theory of individuation is that he clearly prefers it to any of the theories proposed or conclusions reached by the very linguists he is so carefully summarizing: notions which deserve a better hearing. Andrew Pawley, for example, having worked on Tasmanian Vernacular English, proposes the significance of ‘saliency’ (p. 97). Discourse highlighting might well account for variability in pronoun usage; individuation is fixed or static: objects countable or not. As in informal English generally, where he occurs quite commonly for a whole range of objects, Pawley's idea of an ‘animated’, if an optional or stylistic, marker of affect works well (p. 81). Siemund is also rather too dismissive of the notion of ‘personal interest or sympathy of the speaker’ (p. 163). In the end, it is actually very difficult to disagree with Madeleine Mathiot that almost any nonhuman entity can be, in her terms, ‘upgraded’ (p. 105). Disarmingly, a section in Siemund's concluding chapter is called ‘open issues and loose ends’. Here he admits that he has not gone into the issue of he/she alternation (p. 247); and has not developed ‘clear ideas’ on precise triggers. Tantalizingly, at this late stage in the book, he acknowledges that ‘language change, language contact, language acquisition . . . [and] the expression of empathy, stance and values’ might play a role (p. 247). Such factors and others (e.g. formulaic expressions like up she rises or there she blows) are also admitted in footnotes throughout the book. In his own words then, the theory of individuation awaits further ‘decomposition’ (p. 257, fn. 3).

It is with apparent confidence that Siemund states (p. 175) that ‘no comparable phenomena have been reported for most regional varieties of the British Isles and North America, for shift varieties like Irish English, for the Englishes of South Africa, Australia and New Zealand [and] for Creole Englishes and Pidgins. . .’ This is certainly not the case. Puzzlingly, there is indeed his own statement on p. 23 quoted above; and there are many random examples provided by his own hand. What is surely correct, however, is that many dialects of English have not been explored systematically on this subject; and many potentially valuable sources remain untapped: the nineteenth-century volumes of the English Dialect Society, for example, and the field-worker notebooks of the Survey of English Dialects of the mid-twentieth century. It is to be hoped that Siemund himself undertakes further exploration of this playing with the rules of gender assignment, and that other linguists come forward with new data from global varieties at the present day, as well as further evidence from informal standard English.