Gender in English

A system of grammatical gender, whereby every noun was treated as either masculine, feminine or neuter, existed in Old English, but fell out of use during the Middle English period. Modern English retains features relating to natural gender, namely the use of certain nouns and pronouns (such as he and she) to refer specifically to persons or animals of one or other genders and certain others (such as it) for sexless objects – although feminine pronouns are sometimes used when referring to ships (and more uncommonly some airplanes and analogous machinery) and nation states. A system of grammatical gender, whereby every noun was treated as either masculine, feminine or neuter, existed in Old English, but fell out of use during the Middle English period. Modern English retains features relating to natural gender, namely the use of certain nouns and pronouns (such as he and she) to refer specifically to persons or animals of one or other genders and certain others (such as it) for sexless objects – although feminine pronouns are sometimes used when referring to ships (and more uncommonly some airplanes and analogous machinery) and nation states. Some aspects of gender usage in English have been influenced by the movement towards a preference for gender-neutral language. This applies in particular to avoidance of the default use of the masculine he when referring to a person of unknown gender, usually using the neuter they as a third-person singular, and avoidance of the use of certain feminine forms of nouns (such as authoress and poetess). Increasingly, the 'male' form of such nouns is used for both men and women. Old English had a system of grammatical gender similar to that of modern German, with three genders: masculine, feminine, neuter. Determiners and attributive adjectives showed gender inflection in agreement with the noun they modified. Also the nouns themselves followed different declension patterns depending on their gender. Moreover, the third-person personal pronouns, as well as interrogative and relative pronouns, were chosen according to the grammatical gender of their antecedent. Old English grammatical gender was, as in other Germanic languages, remarkably opaque, that is, one often could not know the gender of a noun by its meaning or by the form of the word; this was especially true for nouns referencing inanimate objects. Learners would have had to simply memorize which word goes with which gender.:10 Though nouns referring to human males were generally masculine and for the most part the masculine went with human males and the feminine went with human females, as Charles Jones noted, 'it is with those nouns which show explicit female reference that the sex specifying function of the gender classification system appears to break down,...' Most words referencing human females were feminine, but there was a sizable number of words that were either neuter or even masculine.:6-7 Here are the discrepant nouns referring specifically to human females as listed by Jones::7 Old English had multiple generic nouns for 'woman' stretching across all 3 genders: for example, in addition to the neuter wif and the masculine wifmann listed above, there was also the feminine frowe.:6 For the gender-neutral nouns for 'child', there was the feminine byren in addition to the neuter bearn and the neuter cild (compare English child). And even with nouns referring to persons, one could not always determine gender by meaning or form: for example, with 2 words ending in -mæg, there was the female-specific neuter noun wynmæg, meaning 'winsome maid' or attractive woman; as well as the gender-neutral noun meaning 'paternal kindred' or member of father's side of the family, but which was grammatically feminine: fædernmæg.:7-8 For details of the declension patterns and pronoun systems, see Old English grammar. While inflectional reduction seems to have been incipient in the English language itself, some theories suggest that it was accelerated by contact with Old Norse, especially in northern and midland dialects. This correlates with the geographical extent of the viking Danelaw in the late 9th and early 10th centuries; for almost a century Norse constituted a prestige language with regard to the southern Northumbrian and east Mercian dialects of Old English. By the 11th century, the role of grammatical gender in Old English was beginning to decline. The Middle English of the 13th century was in transition to the loss of a gender system. One element of this process was the change in the functions of the words the and that (then spelt þe and þat; see also Old English determiners): previously these had been non-neuter and neuter forms respectively of a single determiner, but in this period the came to be used generally as a definite article and that as a demonstrative; both thus ceased to manifest any gender differentiation. The loss of gender classes was part of a general decay of inflectional endings and declensional classes by the end of the 14th century. Gender loss began in the north of England; the south-east and the south-west Midlands were the most linguistically conservative regions, and Kent retained traces of gender in the 1340s. Late 14th-century London English had almost completed the shift away from grammatical gender, and Modern English retains no morphological agreement of words with grammatical gender.