Evolution of Gender in English Grammar
How grammatical gender has changed and how it’ll continue to change
I was recently talking with someone who’d come out as non-binary. The conversation turned to the difficulty non-binary people face with grammar, particularly in Spanish, the language we were speaking. In Spanish, gender affects almost all nouns, pronouns, adjectives and articles.
Except for pronouns and a few nouns that are on their way out (like actress), English seems a more gender-neutral language. But English originated from Indo-European languages, which use grammatical gender. This made me wonder if English had always been as gender-neutral as modern English now appears.
I’m not a linguist. I’m just a writer who’s curious about language. Why do nouns in some languages have a gender? What’s the purpose of this? Why doesn’t English use grammatical gender? Or does it? Or did it once?
What is grammatical gender?
In languages that use grammatical gender, nouns are assigned a gender — feminine, masculine or sometimes neuter. In many of these languages, the adjectives and articles associated with a noun must agree with it.
Say you’re talking about a tall child. In “standard” Spanish, you can’t be gender-neutral. As you can…
