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
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