Reflexive Pronouns in Practice
There's a reflexive pronoun that exists in formal grammar and one that lives in specific regional dialects. Understanding the distinction matters when you're editing, teaching, or trying to figure out why someone wrote something that looks wrong but isn't necessarily wrong in context. I spent years working as a developmental editor on manuscripts that passed through rural Southern dialects and AAVE-influenced speech patterns. One of the more persistent questions from authors and readers alike involves the gap between "himself" and what some people call "hisself." It came up constantly in submissions, and it took a while to stop second-guessing my own instincts about when each form was appropriate.
The Himself Vs Hisself Showdown Dissecting The Grammatical Mystery Once And For All
"Himself" functions as the standard reflexive and emphatic pronoun for the third-person singular masculine in Standard English. You use it when the subject and object of a verb are the same person, or when you need to add emphasis to a noun or pronoun. "She bought it herself" means she bought it without help. "He hurt himself" means he injured his own body. These are non-negotiable in formal writing, academic papers, published fiction targeting mainstream audiences, and professional correspondence. "Hisself" does not appear in standard dictionaries as a legitimate entry. It surfaces in Appalachian speech, parts of the Lower South, and certain working-class dialect communities as a reflexive form. Linguists have documented it for decades. It follows a regular pattern in those dialects where the possessive stem "his-" pairs with the reflexive suffix "-self," producing a form that is internally consistent within that linguistic system even though it violates Standard English morphology. The same process applies to "theirself" (singular they + self) and "themself," which has been gaining ground in recent years as singular they usage expanded. Here's where it gets practically complicated. I once edited a literary novel set in eastern Kentucky where the narrator consistently used "hisself" in direct interior monologue but switched to "himself" in third-person narration. The author's approach was deliberate phonetic rendering of a character's uneducated self-reference. A traditional copyeditor would have marked every instance as an error. We spent two days going back and forth before agreeing that the variation was a stylistic choice consistent with the character's voice, not a mistake. The manuscript required a front matter note explaining the dialect choices to agents and reviewers who would otherwise flag it.
The core rule in Standard English remains straightforward: use "himself." Any reflexive construction involving a male singular antecedent demands "himself," not "hisself." The morphological structure of Standard English reflexives pairs objective case pronouns with "-self": himself, herself, itself, themselves. "Hisself" breaks that pattern by using the possessive form instead of the objective form, which is why it registers as incorrect in any formal register. But knowing the rule doesn't tell you what to do when you encounter the non-standard form in the wild. If you're reading a text written in dialect and the author uses "hisself" consistently, it's a feature, not a bug. You evaluate it the same way you'd evaluate any other dialect marker: does it serve the narrative purpose, and is it applied consistently? If the answer is yes, leave it alone. If the author is writing in Standard English and accidentally inserts "hisself," that's a correction. One thing nobody warns you about is the edge case of quoted speech within Standard English prose. When a character who speaks a dialect says "He done it hisself," you preserve the quote exactly. The surrounding narration can remain in Standard English. The tension between the two registers is the point. I've seen writers second-guess this and smooth out the dialogue into "he did it himself," which flattens the character's voice entirely. Don't do that unless the character is supposed to sound like they're code-switching in that moment.
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Another counter-intuitive point: "hisself" is sometimes used emphatically even within varieties that otherwise follow Standard reflexive patterns. It can carry pragmatic weight that "himself" doesn't, marking a kind of colloquial pride or defiance. This usage appears in certain Southern White dialects and carries social meaning beyond grammar. Treating it purely as an error misses the communicative function it serves in those contexts. If you're teaching this to students, the most practical approach is to present both forms with their respective registers rather than simply declaring one wrong. Students learn faster when they understand that "wrong" often means "wrong for this context" rather than "universally invalid." A five-year-old in a dialect community who says "hisself" is speaking grammatically. They're speaking a different grammar. The issue arises only when they transfer that form into contexts that demand Standard English conventions. The workaround I developed for my editorial work was simple but effective. I created a style sheet clause for each dialect-heavy manuscript that specified which reflexive forms the author was using and where. This prevented line editors from auto-flagging every instance. It also forced a conversation about the author's intent before any corrections were applied. That conversation alone saved more manuscripts from unnecessary standardization than any grammar guideline could have.
There's no download link for this because it's not a tool. It's a recognition problem. You either understand the dialect-standard register split and apply it consistently, or you don't, and then you end up correcting valid literary choices or accepting errors in formal writing depending on which direction your bias runs. Both mistakes happen frequently in publishing. The most reliable test I use is the substitution method. Replace the reflexive pronoun with a clearly non-reflexive object. If the sentence falls apart grammatically, you're dealing with a reflexive construction and the standard form applies in Standard English contexts. If the sentence still works, the word might be functioning as an emphatic intensifier, which has its own set of rules that overlap with but don't identical to reflexive usage. Pick up a few linguistics papers on Southern American English dialects if you want deeper documentation. Trask's work on dialect variation covers this territory. The practical takeaway is that "himself" is the only acceptable form in Standard English, "hisself" is a legitimate dialectal variant in specific communities, and the real skill lies in distinguishing between intentional stylistic usage and genuine errors in formal writing.
