It seems like a majority of languages have gendered nouns, but English doesn’t (at least not in a wide-spread, grammatical sense). I know that at *some point* English was gendered, but… how did it stop?
And, if possible, why did English lose its gendered nouns but other languages didn’t?
**EDIT:** Wow, thank you for all the responses! I didn’t expect a casual question bouncing around in my head before bed to get this type of response. But thank you so much! I’m learning so much and it’s actually reviving my interest in linguistics/languages.
Also, I had no clue there were so many languages. Thank you for calling out my western bias when it came to the assumption that most languages were gendered. While it appears a majority of indo-european ones are gendered, gendered languages are actually the minority in a grand sense. That’s definitely news to me.
In: 5344
One of the reasons that could have **contributed** to loss of gender in English is extreme unstressed syllable reduction, basically unstressed syllables being shortened to simpler forms or simple deleted. This probably help to erode many Old English (pre-1066) noun (masculine [stān](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V778-eLqKkau5IUOXl9FAImSqGNQ3aBE/view?usp=drivesdk) “stone” vs feminine [drān](https://drive.google.com/file/d/11osAfbvrHaHEt_l_RWgEvbyDWKzA0dkN/view?usp=drivesdk) “drone”) and [adjective](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tWoAsDdeJs0YHD1baEj-fTLll7fr8dwR/view?usp=drivesdk) inflections (notice how the difference between masculine and feminine forms are almost entirely in the final syllable, which were unstressed) and made losing gender easier as the difference between the two “genders” became more blurred
But other than that, the reason is just that… it happened. Languages oftentimes change without rhyme reason and grammatical structure can be abandoned on a whim of the speakers.
Also just another minor point but
>It seems like a majority of languages have gendered nouns
WALS [chapter 30](https://wals.info/feature/30A#2/26.7/149.1) lists just less than half of its language data (112 in a sample of 257) as having “gender”, which includes languages that have noun class systems NOT based on sex (like Ojibwe or Zulu). The related WALS [chapter 31](https://wals.info/feature/31A#2/26.7/149.1) does list the majority of the languages (Edit : *with noun classes* thx u/missinglinknz) having sex-based “gender” (84 out of 112) but certainly not the “majority” of languages in general
“Anne Curzan suggests that genders were lost because of the language mixing that went on in Northern England during that time. Between the 700s and the 1000s, there were Vikings invading northern England where peasants lived. The two groups spoke different languages: Old English and Old Norse. However, it is quite likely that many people were bilingual and fluent in both languages. Both Old English and Old Norse had gender, but sometimes their genders contradicted each other. In order to simplify communication, gendered nouns simply disappeared.”
>And, if possible, why did English lose its gendered nouns but other languages didn’t?
Other languages have, and not even that far in the distant past. At least one comes to mind: Dutch. If you’ve attempted to study it, and also know German, Dutch seems like someone averaged English and German together and ended up with Dutch. A lot of cognates are common between English and Dutch but are spelled differently. (For example, “I eat” in English is “ik eet” in Dutch, with “eet” pronounced the same as “eat”.) There are a bunch of other words which sound just like English but are spelled differently, or sound like English spoken with a weird accent. As someone who studied German in highschool, to me Dutch was amusing to learn (or dabble in; I learned a bit via Duolingo, but didn’t finish), because half the time, my knowledge of German helped, but half the time, my expectation that Dutch would be more like German than English was incorrect, and it turned out to be more like English.
If you want to try listening to some Dutch to see how much you can understand as an English speaker, [here’s a video in Dutch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_W6XqJncb4). (Don’t mind the bizarre subject matter; it’s just the last Dutch language video I watched.)
Dutch is in the process of undergoing a transition. Masculine and Feminine have merged into one “adult” or “common” gender, but the neuter gender remains. But this is not universal; some speakers and geographic areas still use three genders. See this:
# [Gender in Dutch Grammar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Dutch_grammar)
Quote:
>Gender is a complicated topic in Dutch, because depending on the geographical area or each individual speaker, there are either three genders in a regular structure or two genders in a dichotomous structure (neuter/common with vestiges of a three-gender structure). Both are identified and maintained in formal language.
When it speaks of “three genders” it means masculine, feminine, and neuter, and when it speaks of “two genders” it means common (masculine and feminine merged into one) and neuter.
I suspect if you observe the history of how Dutch is gradually losing the distinction between masculine and feminine genders, it may shed light on processes that may have also happened to English. I have a suspicion that English simply lies on the neutralized end of a linguistic evolutionary gradient of grammatical gender distinction with German at the other end of the gradient, with Dutch being between the two.
**EDIT:**
English is a weird case, because English appears to be a sort of creole language with a Germanic foundation but Latin-based vocabulary. Although many of our short words of common use have Germanic roots, the bulk of English vocabulary have Greek or Latin word roots, and another big chunk of our vocabulary comes from Norman French. (But the Normans themselves were originally “North men” who came from Scandinavia, with germanic roots. European history is complicated.) 58% of English vocabulary comes from Latin-derived languages, including Norman French. 6% comes from Greek roots. Only 26% of English vocabulary is Germanic.
Typically, when creole languages form in the cultural mixture of two languages (such as when European colonial expansion resulted in European languages forming creole mixed languages with the cultures they colonized) the foundational language, which typically has sophisticated grammar, finds its grammar dramatically simplified, while vocabulary from the other languages being mixed in fills out the functional vocabulary of the creole. English shows evidence of this pattern: it has a dramatically simplified grammar compared to other Germanic languages, while most of its vocabulary (by word count, not necessarily by frequency of usage) doesn’t have Germanic roots, but rather, Greek, Latin, and Norman-French. So if you look at how the history of Britain brought waves of invasion from various people groups, both Germanic and Latin, the idea that English emerged as a sort of Creole of these languages makes sense. And since creole languages always simplify the grammar of the root language they’re based on, that may explain why English has a simplified Germanic grammar, shedding gender in the process as an unnecessary complication.
See these videos on the topic:
# LangFocus | [Is English Really a Germanic Language?](https://youtu.be/2OynrY8JCDM)
# LangFocus | [Anglish – What if English Were 100% Germanic?](https://youtu.be/IIo-17SIkws)
The majority of the world’s languages are emphatically **not** gendered. The majority of the **Indo-European Languages** (i.e. the ones with the most speakers) are, yes, but there are 7000+ languages in the world depending on how you define a language and gendered languages are a minority there.
EDIT: Quick [WALS study](https://wals.info/chapter/30) on the topic for the interested.
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Strong recommend of the book **Our magnificent bastard tongue** for anyone who finds the sort of thing fascinating
I mean modern English still has some genders. Up until recently the suffix -tor was for men and -trix was for women. A man was an aviator and a woman was an aviatrix. Now -tor is genderless and trix are for kids.
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