What word can I use for 'they', when referring to a mixed gender group?


I.e. for a group of guys, you have: 彼たち、かれら

and for girls it's: 彼女たち 彼女ら

So if you have a mixed group, which one should you go with? Is there a
different word?




For a group where men are majority ("majority" means they are representative
or typical members), use 彼ら. Where women are majority, use 彼女たち or 彼女ら. For
unspecified mass that you don't care about its internal composition, 彼ら is the
default option.

If you've already mentioned a principal member of the group in the context,
the most natural way is to follow his/her gender.

It doesn't produce any grammatical difficulty, because Japanese "plural" X-たち
actually stands for "(an) X and its kind/company", thus doesn't imply every
member shares the exactly same features that X has. (If X is a common noun,
it's highly inclined to be interpreted just like English plural, but doesn't
eliminate "X and others" reading, neither.)

In more casual speech we have genderless words to use: （こ／そ／あ）の人たち and
（こ／そ／あ）いつら (rude).

Last but not least, have second thought before you're going to use "they" in
Japanese. Pronouns only for keeping the subject's place are usually useless in
Japanese. If you need to disambiguate them from others, best use the word
you've previously used to call them once more.




I think we use the words of status and relationship with speaker than a
pronoun when you call a group.

For example, 先輩たち、先生たち、高校の友達、近所の人たち、etc. And we also use a person name of the
group like 田中さんたち、鈴木さんたち.

In addition 彼ら can be used irrespective of gender but if you want to make
clear a group is mixed man and woman, you can say 彼、彼女ら(たち)は.

