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I'm looking for a short and precise word to describe the use of the pronoun them with plurals, i.e.

Let's kill them zombies!

Them townsfolk sure are full of baloney.

I hate them bees.

It appears to be a fairly common solecism (?) in some areas/communities. It's also quite common in prose and pop culture. Does this convention have a name?

Inhabitants of the rural mid-west of Foobarland are in the habit of prefixing nouns with the word them, using the combined phrase as the subject or the object of a sentence. Descriptive grammarians refer to this pattern as the/a _______.

toniedzwiedz
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1 Answers1

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This is demonstrative them, as explained by the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project 
English in North America.

It’s called this because them is being used as a determiner, the same way that those is used in “standard” English.

Laurel
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  • Yes, that's the answer I was looking for. Thanks! The link is very informative. More so than the answers to the question I unwittingly duplicated. – toniedzwiedz Nov 10 '20 at 14:56