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
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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