The Swedish debate regarding the reform of the third person pronoun plural has been examined with the NLS theory and with the perspective of literacy as not only a mental process but also as a social practice. The debate was initiated in autumn of 2016 by an article written by the teacher Henrik Birkebo in which he argued for a reform. To examine the legitimacy of the main arguments in the debate in relation to pupils’ actual use of the Swedish alternatives for the third person pronoun plural de/dem and dom in secondary school, 307 answers to the National Tests in Swedish and Swedish as a Second Language from 2015 has been quantified in a corpus. The result shows that the argument for a reform due to the hardship for pupils to make out the difference between de and dem sees literacy mainly as a mental process. This is not shown in the corpus. A minority cannot use de and dem as the norm requires, and this minority consists of pupils with high and low grades. The argument to not too hastily make a reform sees literacy as a social practice and as a performance in a social context. This is more likely to be true according to the results of the analysis of the corpus. 82 % of the pupils want to use de/dem which shows that this is seen as a more respected literacy than the use of dom, which only 6 % of the pupils use in the corpus.