English is Crazy #2 [History of Grammatical Gender]
In this article: We define grammatical gender, discuss how it shapes thought, and see how it works across languages. We also talk about languages without any grammatical gender and how they work. Finally, we get into how English speakers have dropped it over time, and how this trend continues today. Lastly, I share some thoughts on what all this means for the future of English.
Let’s go:
What is grammatical gender? It sounds boring.
It’s not boring!! It’s actually super interesting. Grammatical gender is a noun classification system. The most common classes are masculine and feminine, and many languages have just those two.
Masculine and feminine classifications don’t have anything to do with men, women, or sex, for the most part. It’s arbitrary. Like, there’s nothing inherently manly or feminine about a table. Tables don’t have hormones or reproductive organs.
And yet, there are some fascinating studies by Boroditsky that show how speakers of gendered languages tend to project their ideas about men and women onto inanimate objects. In her most famous study, she gathered a group of German and Spanish speakers, and asked them to describe some random words, like “bridge,” and “key.”
Now, “bridge” is feminine in German, and masculine in Spanish. And so the German speakers described it as, “beautiful,” “elegant,” “fragile,” “peaceful,” “pretty,” and “slender.” Meanwhile, the Spanish speakers described it as, “big,” “dangerous,” “long,” “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering.” But, like, how can it be both fragile and sturdy? Those are complete opposites.
And if you think, maybe German bridges are just reallyyy unsafe, well, the same thing happened with the rest of the words. “Key” is feminine in Spanish, and masculine in German. The Spanish speakers described it as, “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny,” while the German speakers used words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful.”
This is a classic example of how language shapes thought. Because if “masculine” and “feminine” classifications were called “type 1” and “type 2” nouns instead, we wouldn’t be projecting our biases about people onto random objects. And if the Spanish speakers had learned German instead of Spanish, they’d have perceived these objects completely differently.
This is one reason why many people have moved to using more gender-neutral language, like “salesperson” instead of “salesman.” The idea is that if we continuously refer to “man” as the standard person for the job, and match it with masculine grammar (“he/him”) we’ll believe it, even unconsciously.
Blah blah blah, how does it work in practice?
A noun’s grammatical gender affects the grammar of some other words in the sentence. But which words are affected really depends on the language you’re speaking. They all do it differently.
But here’s an example of how it works in French. “Meeting” is “réunion,” and it’s feminine. So if we want to say “your meeting,” or “the meeting,” then we need to adjust “your” and “the” to be feminine as well:
The meeting = La réunion [Fem]
Your meeting = Ta réunion [Fem]
Meanwhile, “office” in French is “bureau,” and it’s masculine. So here we change “the” and “your” to be masculine:
The office = Le bureau [Masc]
Your office = Ton bureau [Masc]
Helllooo, what about me? I’m not an office?? I’m a person?? How do we classify people??
When it comes to nouns that refer to people and sometimes animals, we usually classify them according to the genders we believe they have in real life.
So, “the man” in French is “l’homme.” It’s masculine, and uses masculine pronouns, like “il,” which is “he.” Meanwhile, “the woman” is “la femme.” It’s feminine, and uses feminine pronouns, like “elle,” which is “she.” Below, we adjusted the pronouns and adjectives to match the gender of whatever person we’re talking about.
He is happy = Il est heureux [Masc]
She is happy = Elle est heureuse [Fem]
While this is mostly true for people, it doesn’t work for subjects or ideas that have to do with people. Those are usually still arbitrary. Like, here are some words that are culturally associated with women, but are classified as masculine in Hebrew: “flower,” “beauty,” “pregnancy,” and “(menstrual) period.”
So that’s it? There’s just masculine and feminine? Easy peasy?
Nope! Some languages have a neutral category as well, like German, and some have many more classes, like Chechen (it has six!)
And then, there are languages with no grammatical gender at all, like Persian. In these languages, there’s no way to say “he” or “she.” So, in Persian, if you ask people what their pronouns are, everyone will tell you “ou.” Everyone.
He is happy = ou khoshhāl ast
She is happy = ou khoshhāl ast
But you can still say words that refer to people who in real life have gender, like “man” (mard), and “woman” (zan.) And Persian also has lots of Arabic loanwords with feminine markers. But since there’s no grammatical gender, we don’t need to adjust any other word to fit whether we’re talking about a man or a woman.
The man is happy = mard khoshhāl ast
The woman is happy = zan khoshhāl ast
Persian started dropping grammatical gender around 200–600 CE. This means gender has been going out of style for at least 1,800 years!
When is she going to talk about English???
Finally! Let’s do it:
OLD ENGLISH ~
[450] Old English was spoken by the Anglo Saxons in Britain. It had three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter — just like German. So, for example:
The man is happy = Sē mann is glæd [Masc]
The woman is happy = Þæt wīf is glæd [Neuter]
The queen is happy = Sēo cwen is glædu [Fem]
Here, “the” and “happy” change based on the noun’s gender.
And did you notice that “woman” is neuter?? There’s also a masculine synonym, “wīfmann.” This goes to show that grammatical gender really is just a classification system, and has little to do with people.
[950] After this year, “sē”, “sēo,” and “þæt” (from the above example) began merging into “the.”
[1066] This is when the Normans conquered and imposed Anglo-Norman (which came from Old French) upon upper British society. This affected even the common people, and ended up profoundly influencing the English language. It’s the main reason why English today has so much in common with Latin languages.
MIDDLE ENGLISH ~
[1100] This is when English really started losing its grammatical gender. Some say that after the conquest, people got confused about which masculine and feminine suffixes to use, especially with all the new loanwords. And so they just… stopped using them. And then they didn’t pass them down to the next generations. And that was it. Kind of.
Because around this same time, “natural gender” became popular. In other words, people were assigning “he/she” according to the gender they believed people and animals actually had, and not according to arbitrary class assignments. Inanimate objects became neutral, and lots of nouns referring to people became “common gender.” This means that they don’t change based on gender, like “parent,” or “teacher,” as opposed to ones that do, like mother/father, waiter/waitress.
[1375] And then there was this French woman, Countess Yolande. She wrote a medieval romance poem called Guillaume de Palerme in 1200. It was translated into Middle English in 1375, as William and the Werewolf.
I don’t know about you, but a French medieval romance with werewolves?? Sign me UP!!
Anyway, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, this English translation holds the earliest written instance of “they/them” as singular. Here’s the passage, with Middle English on top:
Hastely hiȝed eche … þei neyȝþed so neiȝh … þere william & his worþi lef were liand i-fere.
Each man hurried … till they drew near … where William and his darling were lying together.
OED also suggests that singular “they” was probably used even earlier, since it could have existed in speech long before it was written down.
MODERN ENGLISH ~
[1600s→2023+] That’s us! By now, all that’s left of masculine and feminine is he/she for people and animals, and we still have some gender-specific nouns. Everything else is neutral. The exception would be boats and countries, which are sometimes likened to women, and accompanied by “she/her.”
But aside from that, we no longer adjust adjectives, determiners, or other words in the sentence in accordance with a noun’s gender.
And today we continue the trend of dropping grammatical gender.
Sometimes it’s on purpose, encouraged by activism and social movements. Like, how we went from “salesmen” and “policemen” to “salespeople” and “police officers.” And many women in the acting profession now refer to themselves as “actors” instead of “actresses.” Remember what that’s called? Common gender nouns! You see? Nothing new here. And, of course, some people want to be referred to as they/them.
But sometimes it’s not on purpose, and we don’t even realize we’re doing it. For example, we use singular they/them all the time, and not just in steamy romance poems:
- If you’ve recently made a new friend, you might be considering asking them to hang out one on one. (Source, 2022)
In the first one, the person in question is hypothetical, and could be any gender. So the gender neutral “they/them” is the easiest and most natural pairing.
- I just got an interesting phone call where the person told me that they did not dial my number… The person I spoke to told me that their phone said that someone from their contact list was calling them. (Source, 2021)
But here, the person in question is real, and the gender is known to the author. For some reason, the author chooses not to share the person’s gender at all, and uses “person” instead of “man” or “woman,” and “they/them” freely.
So gender really is disappearing?? What’s going to happen to English?? How will we express ourselves?? It’s such a beautiful language, it would be a shame to lose aspects for no reason!!!
Well, English is going to change. It already is. It’s going to drop a lot of stuff, and pick up other stuff. It’ll get cool new words, and others will go out of style. And speakers will find new ways to express ideas.
That’s not a bad thing, you know. Like, the whole point of a language is to serve its speakers. If gender was slowing our ancestors down and confusing them, why did they need it?
And it’s true today too. It’s much faster to learn a language and communicate when you don’t need to remember the gender of a washing machine. And if the language doesn’t serve our modern needs, we can reshape it, just like the generations did before us.
If you really think about it, language is actually a hand-me-down. Like the clothes that were handed down to you from your older siblings. They were always too big and not your style. But they’re yours now, and it’s you who needs to wear them. So why not alter them to suit you? Must you walk around in something that doesn’t fit?
When it comes to beauty, well, English will always be beautiful. Modern English evolved from Old English, and the two are very different. So if you’ve fallen in love with English like I have, then you’ve fallen for a late draft of a language! You’ve fallen for the changes, friend. And if you’d been born a couple hundred years from now, it’d be the new, gender-free draft that you’d love. Simply because that’d be the one you’d know.
And if you’re really worried, remember that some of the greatest poets, like Rumi, spoke a language that had no grammatical gender at all.
But, still. Maybe you don’t like these things. Maybe they don’t sit well with you. That’s natural. Change is scary. But language is dynamic, and grammar and vocabulary will always change with time, regardless of our feelings, politics, or ideology today. And if it’s not gender, it’ll be something else. Like, notice how different the original Old and Middle English examples were from Modern English? And one day, Modern English will be just as foreign to a new generation.
And that’s okay.
I, for one, am excited to ride the wave and see where it goes!
Will you join me?
