# Why and when did English stop using gender? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 24, 2013, 5:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797 "2013-03-24T05:06:21Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![ombre12](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/d26b3c/32.png) [@ombre12](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ombre12)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 5:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/1 "2013-03-24T05:06:21Z")
Kind of an add-on to a previous thread. I took French and German in college. Was mostly reading literature so I got pretty good at doing that and didn’t really have to pay much attention to gender. Later on when trying to speak or write in either language…I found out that learning the gender of nouns was very important. Wish I’d paid more attention to that part while originally learning those languages. C’est ma faute. Je sais. But I was wondering why and when English, borrowed from both languages, which both used gender, and the agreement of gender, decided to give up on the whole seemingly unnecessary thing. Sometime after 1066, did the Anglo Saxon commoners decide over centuries to just stop using gender? Or did the Normand nobility sitting around a table sometime or other decide themselves to drop gender? Because it was hard enough for people, nobles and commoners, to understand each other even without throwing genders from two different languages into the mix. Maybe some nobleman said “Why are we bothering with all this gender crap? Lets just do away with it” And the other Normand nobles said …“Bonne idee” Anybody know anything about when and why English lost its gender? ---
**Author:** ![Inner\_Stickler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inner_stickler/32/318_2.png) [@Inner\_Stickler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inner_Stickler)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 5:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/2 "2013-03-24T05:18:22Z")
1. Lloyd’s List, the ship newspaper officially changed its policy on ship pronouns moving from she and her to it and it. But seriously, Old english determined gender by noun endings many of which were vowels or relatively unmarked. It’s pretty easy for vowels at the end of words to become unstressed, lose their significance and erode away, especially, when you’ve got the Danes and the Normans and later the Parisian French all jostling your case system around in a time where written documents were hard to come by and schooling relatively non-existent. Once the gendered determiners started to merge together, it was the end of the line for gender and it got mostly chucked. I think somewhere between 1100 and 1300 is when it died out although it has cropped up vaguely throughout history. I know there’s a medical text from the 1600s that recommends cooking a turnip til she turns black as a cure for sore throats, I believe. edit: I also believe, although I can’t be bothered to look it up officially, that english hasn’t lost gender, exactly. We’ve simply dumped everything into the neuter form as evidenced by our use of it (or hit as it would have been in OE). ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 5:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/3 "2013-03-24T05:31:38Z")
That would make sense. If arbitrary genders between languages do not align, and the Norman and Saxon languages were blending into the same community, it would be difficult to establish concord on which gender is preferable for, say, a table or an oxcart, hence, gender would fade away. Basically the same thing would happen with the noun declensions, which were present in OE but not OF: if a language can benefit from simplification, it will, perhaps one might call it a Pidgin-Creole effect. ---
**Author:** ![ombre12](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/d26b3c/32.png) [@ombre12](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ombre12)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/4 "2013-03-24T14:52:17Z")
Both great answers. Thank you. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 3:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/5 "2013-03-24T15:35:50Z")
Not sure about “why”, but the wikipedia article has a decent description of “when”: > [@](#): > > Decline of grammatical gender > > 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, as indicated by the increasing use of the gender-neutral identifier þe (the).[1] The loss of gender classes was part of a general decay of inflectional endings and declensional classes by the end of the 14th century.[2] 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.[1] Late 14th-century London English had almost completed the shift away from grammatical gender,[1] and Modern English retains no morphological agreement of words with grammatical gender.[2] Note that this is reflective of there being many varieties of “English” before a standard version was recognized. ---
**Author:** ![Winnipeg](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/ec9cab/32.png) [@Winnipeg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Winnipeg)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 4:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/6 "2013-03-24T16:43:50Z")
When I was a boy in the 60’s I used to visit my grandmother in Devon, her and all her family and friends used to give inanimate objects a gender in conversation. “put her on the table” asking for a plate to be put on a table. Everything used be “her” or “him”. ---
**Author:** ![Derc](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dfb087/32.png) [@Derc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derc)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 5:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/7 "2013-03-24T17:45:08Z")
I believe an inanimate object that can give one a ‘ride’ becomes female, maybe due to the TLC expended in preparing ‘her’, the more the expense the more ‘she’ becomes. ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/8 "2013-03-24T17:49:25Z")
> [@Inner\_Stickler](#): > > … > edit: I also believe, although I can’t be bothered to look it up officially, that english hasn’t lost gender, exactly. We’ve simply dumped everything into the neuter form as evidenced by our use of it (or hit as it would have been in OE). I’m a native speaker of English and I agree with this. English still has a three-gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) gender system. What has happened is that almost all non-animate nouns have been classified or reclassified as neuter. In Spanish, almost all nouns are masculine or feminine and take the _same_ pronouns as a boy or girl would (though there is the [“a personal”](http://www.drlemon.com/Grammar/personala.html) preposition (?) used when a person is a direct object of a sentence.) E.g. ¿Dónde está mi hermana? (Where is my sister?) Ella está en Nueva York. (She is in New York.) ¿Dónde está mi camisa? (Where is my shirt?) Ella está en el armario de tu hermana. (She is in your sister’s closet.) ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 6:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/9 "2013-03-24T18:07:16Z")
When I was young, in the 50s and 60s, it was taught that English largely had “natural” gender, with specific defined exceptions. The rules I recall are: 1. A male person\* or a known-male animal takes the masculine pronouns. 2. A female person\*, a known-female animal, or a ship or boat takes the feminine pronouns. 3. A person of unknown gender (“the teacher”, “the doctor”, “the City Clerk”) takes common-gender pronouns, which are identical to the masculine pronouns. 4. An inanimate object, an animal of unknown gender, or a baby takes the neuter-gender pronouns. 5. Personifications “don’t count” – they are intentionally-poetic assignment of gender identity to abstract concepts. (“Dawn blushes as she dances naked in the East” or “Love shoots his arrows into the hearts of men and women.”) With growing awareness that the “common gender” using masculine pronouns worked injustices on female professional persons, or even shepherd/shepherdess or schoolmaster/schoolmistress and the like, gender-specific terms went into decline and common-gender pronouns were replaced by “he or she” and its declensions or the solecistic singular “they/them”. And referring to a baby as “it” became passe, with the baby’s sex being signalled or properly inquired about. With this growing effort to use inclusive language, English grammatical gender was left with only the nautical feminine. So odd as it sounds, the 1992 Lloyds shift may actually be the correct answer. \*I intentionally did not use “man or boy” and “woman or girl” here because it would also include gods/goddesses, angels, SF aliens, supernatural and fantasy entities, etc. ---
**Author:** ![\_Quiubo\_vato](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/_/eb8c5e/32.png) [@\_Quiubo\_vato](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/_Quiubo_vato)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/10 "2013-03-24T18:51:41Z")
> [@Winnipeg](#): > > When I was a boy in the 60’s I used to visit my grandmother in Devon, her and all her family and friends used to give inanimate objects a gender in conversation. > > “put her on the table” asking for a plate to be put on a table. > > Everything used be “her” or “him”. Even today, ships are referred to as “she.” Ain’t it dumb? I just call 'em “it.” Changing times Back in the day (way back), in Journalism 101, a male was blond and a female was blonde. If a paragraph began with a number, then spell it out. e.g., Forty people were there, but 20 of them left. Numbers 1 through 9 are spelled out in any case. There are six inside and 34 outside. Pictures are hung; people are hanged. ```auto Oh well, ¿Qué más da? (What difference does it make?) :cool: ``` ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/11 "2013-03-24T18:58:21Z")
> [@robert\_columbia](#): > > (though there is the [“a personal”](http://www.drlemon.com/Grammar/personala.html) preposition (?) used when a person is a direct object of a sentence.) I’d never heard it called _a personal_, but I think you were asking whether it’s a preposition: yes, it is; the construction is exactly, word for word, the same as in English (see below). What I don’t see is what does that have to do with gender. Dale la camisa _a tu padre_ = give the shirt _to your father_. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 7:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/12 "2013-03-24T19:01:24Z")
> [@Polycarp](#): > > When I was young, in the 50s and 60s, it was taught that English largely had “natural” gender, with specific defined exceptions. The rules I recall are: > > 1. A male person\* or a known-male animal takes the masculine pronouns. > 2. A female person\*, a known-female animal, or a ship or boat takes the feminine pronouns. > 3. A person of unknown gender (“the teacher”, “the doctor”, “the City Clerk”) takes common-gender pronouns, which are identical to the masculine pronouns. > 4. An inanimate object, an animal of unknown gender, or a baby takes the neuter-gender pronouns. > 5. Personifications “don’t count” – they are intentionally-poetic assignment of gender identity to abstract concepts. (“Dawn blushes as she dances naked in the East” or “Love shoots his arrows into the hearts of men and women.”) I remember being taught that actually English has a handful of exceptions where grammatical gender does come into play. The only one I can recall is the adjective blond/blonde for males/females respectively. Even if this is correct, and such rules are still being followed (and I’m dubious), thank goodness it’s limited to just a few… ---
**Author:** ![Inner\_Stickler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inner_stickler/32/318_2.png) [@Inner\_Stickler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inner_Stickler)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/13 "2013-03-24T19:24:36Z")
It can be done with brunet/brunette as well, but I don’t think almost anyone does. But that’s not grammatical gender, that’s semantic gender. (It’s also annoying. This isn’t french.) ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2013, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/14 "2013-03-24T19:37:03Z")
> [@Polycarp](#): > > 1. A person of unknown gender (“the teacher”, “the doctor”, “the City Clerk”) takes common-gender pronouns, which are identical to the masculine pronouns. This has never been universally true for all speakers. It’s never even been universally true for all well-regarded writers. [Or were William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the authors of the King James Bible known for writing in solecisms?](http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html) > [@Inner\_Stickler](#): > > But that’s not grammatical gender, that’s semantic gender. Good luck getting anyone to understand the difference. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_the\_Immortal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/6de8d8/32.png) [@Max\_the\_Immortal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_the_Immortal)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2013, 5:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/15 "2013-03-25T05:40:52Z")
I have a better question. Why does any language assign gender to inanimate objects in the first place? ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2013, 5:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/16 "2013-03-25T05:48:06Z")
The origin of grammatical gender, at least as pertains to IE languages, is tightly coupled with declensions of nouns, “declensions” in this case referring to the eight-odd classes of nouns in the language. Each class of nouns was based on the character of its phonology–its “stem”. and had its own pattern of endings for the various combinations of case and number, and, furthermore, most of these classes contained nouns in only one or two of the three possible genders. In a considerably reduced form, the same sort of pattern still exists in German, where the various ways of forming the plural are closely related to the gender of the nouns involved. For instance, many German nouns ending in “e” like _die Wiese_ (“the meadow”), are feminine and form the plural by adding “n”–_die Wiesen_, nouns that end in consonants like _das Blatt_ (“the leaf”) are usually masculine or neuter, and form their plurals either by changing the root vowel, or by suffixing “-e” or “-er”, or by both–hence, _die Blätter_. These patterns aren’t infallible, but they are sufficiently reliable to be useful to foreigners who are learning the language. Grammatical gender in Old English nouns follows that of German fairly closely, in the sense cognate nouns usually have the same gender in both languages. But the decay of grammatical gender had already begun before the Norman Conquest, so that wasn’t the primary cause. In the evolution of Romance and Germanic languages generally, the mergers some terminal sounds and disappearance of others played a significant role in decay of the inflectional system, because the lost distinctions were collectively necessary for the case systems to work. In Dutch and some of the Norse languages the system of grammatical gender is arguably in a state of mid-decay, because there the masculine and feminine genders have collapsed into one “common” gender, in contrast to the neuter which persists. ---
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2013, 10:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/17 "2013-03-25T10:46:19Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > In Dutch and some of the Norse languages the system of grammatical gender is arguably in a state of mid-decay, because there the masculine and feminine genders have collapsed into one “common” gender, in contrast to the neuter which persists. If so, it’s got a hell of a half-life; the gender system in Swedish appears to have [disappeared completely](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Swedish#Late_Old_Swedish) by 1500 and has been relatively stable ever since. It’s been years since I took that Old English course at Georgetown, but comparing what I remember of texts like \*Beowulf \*and Bede’s _Chronicle_ with the equally half-remembered texts from Chaucer, I’d venture the argument that English had lost its gender system well before 1400. ---
**Author:** ![Svejk\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ea666f/32.png) [@Svejk\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Svejk_1)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2013, 11:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/18 "2013-03-25T11:01:18Z")
> [@Max\_the\_Immortal](#): > > I have a better question. Why does any language assign gender to inanimate objects in the first place? Actually, that’s a far worse question, and one that has been dealt with on this board countless times, every time some English-only person thinks that French/German/Spanish/Russian people “really thinks the chair/table/conceptual continuity is a girl LOL”. As has already been pointed out, grammatical gender does not have too much too do with the biological one, and is really just a way to class nouns into groups that behave similarly when declining them. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2013, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/19 "2013-03-25T18:57:21Z")
> [@Olentzero](#): > > If so, it’s got a hell of a half-life; the gender system in Swedish appears to have [disappeared completely](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Swedish#Late_Old_Swedish) by 1500 and has been relatively stable ever since. Exactly. As the article in your link says, there were only two grammatical genders from about 1500 onwards. In contrast to the Romance languages, the reduction of gender resulted not from the loss of the neuter, but from the merger of feminine and masculine. Dutch is similar in this regard, and IIRC the other Norse languages except for Icelandic and Faroese. > [@](#): > > It’s been years since I took that Old English course at Georgetown, but comparing what I remember of texts like \*Beowulf \*and Bede’s _Chronicle_ with the equally half-remembered texts from Chaucer, I’d venture the argument that English had lost its gender system well before 1400. The gender system was gone by Chaucer’s time, but was still extant, if moribund, in the early ME period, when the inflection of certain nouns in the genitive plural revealed their feminine gender. The best known example of that is the early 12th C. devotional work _[Ancrene Wisse](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancrene_Wisse)_. While it’s true enough that the word _Ancrene_ (“Of the anchoresses” or “for the anchoresses”) is a “naturually” feminine word, like “woman” or “girl”, this inflection still existed for some feminines denoting inanimate, or at least genderless objects. ---
**Author:** ![Derc](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dfb087/32.png) [@Derc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derc)\ **Post date:** [March 25, 2013, 8:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797/20 "2013-03-25T20:41:04Z")
> [@\_Quiubo\_vato](#): > > Even today, ships are referred to as “she.” Ain’t it dumb? I just call 'em “it.” > > Changing times > > Pictures are hung; people are hanged. > > ```auto > Oh well, ¿Qué más da? (What difference does it make?) :cool: > > ``` Beg to differ, in UK a fellow with large genitalia is ‘well hung’, it’s a man to man expression, especially when drunk, not used by women, they know the truth. Due to pc politeness, ‘dumb’ is not used in the UK other than for a person unable to speak. (I’m not criticising). [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-and-when-did-english-stop-using-gender/653797.md?page=2)