# Why do so many languages use gender? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 19, 2013, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388 "2013-03-19T19:25:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Itself](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/d07c76/32.png) [@Itself](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Itself)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2013, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/21 "2013-03-19T23:08:37Z")
> [@Hello\_Again](#): > > Sexual dimorphism is a pretty notable feature of the human condition and the habit of animal and plant husbandry. There isn’t a one to one correspondence but language usually encodes concepts important to a culture. Apparently proto-indo-Europeans noticed males and females were different and found this difference significant enough to want to talk about it a lot, and extrapolate it to non-human, non-animal things. Grammatical gender has very little to do with biological gender, and trying to extrapolate animal biology to inanimate or abstract things like ‘foot’ (male in PIE) or ‘snow’ (female in PIE) or ‘cloud’ (neuter in PIE) doesn’t make much sense. For PIE in particular, it probably classified nouns originally as common vs. neuter (as in Anatolian); the three-gendered system (masculine, feminine, and neuter) was a later innovation. PIE had an ending -eh2/-ih2 used for creating semantically-female derivations (e.g., Greek _theos_ ‘god, goddess’ -\> _thea_ ‘goddess’, which eventually restricted the former to simply ‘god’) and for converting verbs to abstract nouns (e.g., Greek _phero_ -\> ‘I carry’ -\> _phora_ ‘tribute’). That ending, plus the fact that _gwenh2_ ‘woman’ happens to end in -h2 as well, may have split the common gender into masculine and feminine. The common vs. neuter distinction may also have been related to nouns that could act as agents versus those that could only act as patients. The morphology of the neuter case doesn’t behave like the other two (and, indeed, this is one of the arguments for at least partial ergativity in PIE). ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2013, 1:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/22 "2013-03-20T01:09:45Z")
I don’t even know why the genders in, say German, are even called masculine, feminine and neuter. Das (neuter) Maedchen is a girl, der (I’m not sure of this, but it is masculine) Weib is a woman (or wife) and so on. You will see in French things like: "La personne…, elle… even though the person in question is male. One thing that noun classes do is make it easier to vary the word order, which is generally hard in English. For some purposes, Japanese has some 20 word classes, one of which roughly corresponds to (non-human) mammals. But squirrels are classified as birds and whales as fish. As a result (presumably) when there was a taboo against eating mammals (which ended with the Meiji revolution), they still ate squirrels and whales. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2013, 1:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/23 "2013-03-20T01:21:48Z")
Here’s a list of some of the various forms that gender distinctions in language can have and which languages have them. Note that gender merges into noun classes. Besides distinguishing whether a noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter, many languages distinguish between animate (which can mean anything between alive and sentient) and inanimate. Many languages have noun classes which include gender and animateness as well as various other things: > **[List of languages by type of grammatical genders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders)** > > This article lists languages depending on their use of grammatical gender. > Certain language families, such as the Austronesian, Turkic and Uralic language families, usually have no grammatical genders (see genderless language). Many indigenous American languages (across language families) have no grammatical gender. > Austronesian ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2013, 1:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/24 "2013-03-20T01:24:23Z")
Here’s a claim (which I can’t evaluate myself) about the origin of genders in Indo-European languages: > **[Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos](https://www.yahoo.com/)** > > Latest news coverage, email, free stock quotes, live scores and video are just the beginning. Discover more every day at Yahoo! ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2013, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/25 "2013-03-20T01:28:41Z")
Here’s another paper (which I can’t evaluate either) on the origin of genders in Indo-European languages: > **[EvolutionOfGender.pdf](https://www.foundalis.com/res/EvolutionOfGender.pdf)** > > 144.08 KB ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2013, 6:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/26 "2013-03-20T06:26:44Z")
The OP says that English “doesn’t have (sex-related) gender”, but it does: it’s not as pervasive as in other Indo-European languages (AFAI can tell it sticks to nouns and pronouns, not affecting adjectives, articles or verbs), but there are many words which are applicable only to one sex-or-gender. I’m reasonably sure a cow is not the same thing as a bull; two of the first words any ESL student learns are “he” and “she”. ---
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2013, 6:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/27 "2013-03-20T06:46:59Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > The OP says that English “doesn’t have (sex-related) gender”, but it does: it’s not as pervasive as in other Indo-European languages (AFAI can tell it sticks to nouns and pronouns, not affecting adjectives, articles or verbs), but there are many words which are applicable only to one sex-or-gender. I’m reasonably sure a cow is not the same thing as a bull; two of the first words any ESL student learns are “he” and “she”. No, English does not have gender. You do not choose the pronouns “he”, “she” and “it” according to the noun referred to, but according to the general rule that “he” and “she” refer to humans of known gender, and “it” is used for almost everything else, with some problems about how to refer to humans of unknown gender, and a few special rules like “she” for ships. Of course, many English nouns will go nearly 100% of the time with one of “he”, “she” or “it”, but they can change according to meaning. For example, a knight is usually a “he” and a queen is usually a “she”, but if they are chess pieces, then both are “it”. ---
**Author:** ![Ramira](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ramira/32/344_2.png) [@Ramira](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ramira)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2013, 8:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/28 "2013-03-20T08:16:58Z")
You are wrong. It does although english do not realize it. Even in the professional paper that is cited by Wendell, on the very first page “English, a Germanic language, has a natural gender system like Tamil, reflected only in personal, possessive and reflexive pronouns.” ---
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2013, 8:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/29 "2013-03-20T08:43:11Z")
A “natural gender system” is not what linguists think of as grammatical gender, because, as the article says, it depends on the semantics of the noun referred to. You might as well say that Japanese has gender because it has words that mean “he” and “she”, i.e., “kanojo” and “kareshi”. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2013, 8:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/30 "2013-03-20T08:50:15Z")
Thai language doesn’t have grammatical gender, but it has a large number of noun classifications, as defined by classifiers, [312 according to this page](http://www.thai-language.com/ref/classifier-list). The classification is often based on shape, but there is some weirdness: for example, the classifier for flat objects (e.g. leaves, sheets of paper) is also used for containers (e.g. buckets, suitcases). Gender is missing in many cases where it would be obligatory in English, e.g. aunt/uncle, brother/sister, he/she. Since many nicknames are not gender-specific, it’s not uncommon to talk about someone without revealing(\*) his/her gender. Personal pronouns are too complicated to summarize, but _very_ few are limited to one gender. Since emotional relationship plays a role in pronoun selection, some are primarily spoken by women, but you may hear a man say them speaking to an intimate … or flirtatiously! (\* - Any comments I make on Thai language ambiguity derive from native-language informants, so don’t relate to my own imperfect knowledge.) ---
**Author:** ![Keeve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f07891/32.png) [@Keeve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Keeve)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2013, 12:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/31 "2013-03-20T12:27:44Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > The OP says that English “doesn’t have (sex-related) gender”, but it does: it’s not as pervasive as in other Indo-European languages (AFAI can tell it sticks to nouns and pronouns, not affecting adjectives, articles or verbs), but there are many words which are applicable only to one sex-or-gender. I’m reasonably sure a cow is not the same thing as a bull; two of the first words any ESL student learns are “he” and “she”. This is exactly why - from the very beginning - I presumed that the OP was referring to verbs. I cannot think of even one verb in English that is different for male and female, although they vary widely for singular and plural, and for me/you/other. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2013, 2:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/32 "2013-03-20T14:08:48Z")
> [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](#): > > Obligatory David Sedaris link (warning: .pdf file): [http://dana.ucc.nau.edu/vrs26/english\_105/PDF%20documents/Sedaris\_-\_Make\_that\_a\_double\_PDF.pdf](http://dana.ucc.nau.edu/vrs26/english_105/PDF%20documents/Sedaris_-_Make_that_a_double_PDF.pdf) Thanks-- I was wondering where in his books… I’d heard him rant about gender, but wasn’t sure where it was in print. The bit I remembered was something like: “Because it’s female and lays eggs, a chicken is masculine. Vagina is also masculine, while the word masculinity is feminine…” And how he started using plurals (which are genderless) for everything. Which, when used with store clerks, resulted in him buying a lot of stuff. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2013, 2:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/33 "2013-03-20T14:20:36Z")
> [@Keeve](#): > > This is exactly why - from the very beginning - I presumed that the OP was referring to verbs. I cannot think of even one verb in English that is different for male and female, although they vary widely for singular and plural, and for me/you/other. If only verbs count, then Spanish, Catalan, French or German suddenly don’t have gender… that sure seems like a stretch (when verbal forms gender-match it’s because they’re not being used as verbs but as adjectives). ---
**Author:** ![Hermitian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hermitian/32/470_2.png) [@Hermitian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hermitian)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2013, 2:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/34 "2013-03-20T14:47:07Z")
> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#): > > ETA: Also, it seems likely to me that you find the idea of grammatical gender difficult to learn because your milk tongue does not have it. If the first language being spoken around you had been a language with gender, it would seem natural to you. I would say it is difficult to learn because now you have to memorize another piece of useless metadata for every noun. I’m sure drawing water out of well with a bucket seemed natural to billions of people before we were able to get it out of the kitchen sink. That doesn’t make it not-difficult. ---
**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2013, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/35 "2013-03-20T19:39:03Z")
> [@Giles](#): > > No, English does not have gender. You do not choose the pronouns “he”, “she” and “it” according to the noun referred to, but according to the general rule that “he” and “she” refer to humans of known gender, and “it” is used for almost everything else, with some problems about how to refer to humans of unknown gender, and a few special rules like “she” for ships. Of course, many English nouns will go nearly 100% of the time with one of “he”, “she” or “it”, but they can change according to meaning. For example, a knight is usually a “he” and a queen is usually a “she”, but if they are chess pieces, then both are “it”. That’s still more grammatical gender than some languages. Hungarian, for example, uses the same word for both “he” and “she”. A Hungarian speaker may wonder why English has to bother with such a “useless” distinction, in the same way that English speakers wonder about the “useless” distinction in French between “le” and “la”. To a native speaker of any of these languages, it all makes sense. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2013, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/36 "2013-03-20T20:25:55Z")
> [@Hermitian](#): > > I would say it is difficult to learn because now you have to memorize another piece of useless metadata for every noun. > > I’m sure drawing water out of well with a bucket seemed natural to billions of people before we were able to get it out of the kitchen sink. That doesn’t make it not-difficult. Yes, but pretty much every language has bizarre complications. When I was taking an East Asian language and culture course, we talked about counters. Counters are things where (roughly) the word for “two” in a phrase like “I want two \” changes (or has something appended to it) depending on what type of thing \ is (is it small and round? Is it flat? Is it bound? Shaped like a bottle?). This seems utterly needless and bizarre, and can indeed be a significant hurdle for people learning, say, Japanese. However, it was pointed out that English has an almost identical problem in grouping nouns. It’s a **pride** of Lions. A **pod** of whales. No less arbitrary, almost equally infuriating for people learning English. But it seems natural to English speakers. So yeah, grammatical gender is arbitrary, needless, and makes things difficult for non-speakers, but it’s not like that’s unique to it as a concept. ---
**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 20, 2013, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/37 "2013-03-20T20:51:02Z")
Note that the majority of groupings names were made up in the 1800s for Austenian-style parlor games. You can call it a flock of larks and be just as correct (and a lot less dunderheaded) as the moony-eyed numbskull gushing about an exultation. ---
**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 20, 2013, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/38 "2013-03-20T21:43:31Z")
> [@sunstone](#): > > … > Japanese men and women have what might be considered two parallel languages in a limited way. Men use certain words and vocal tones, while women use other words and vocal tones to say essentially the same thing. If a man were to use the woman’s words, he would be in social “trouble” and vice versa. > > So this is an example of true gendered language, not just different forms of the same word. > > See [Gender differences in Japanese - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_spoken_Japanese) > … One thing I’ve heard is that English speaking male fans of anime who watch it in the original language tend to not only pick up a feminine speech pattern in Japanese but they end up sounding like they are trying to talk like young girls. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2013, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/39 "2013-03-20T21:46:54Z")
> [@Hermitian](#): > > I would say it is difficult to learn because now you have to memorize another piece of useless metadata for every noun. > > I’m sure drawing water out of well with a bucket seemed natural to billions of people before we were able to get it out of the kitchen sink. That doesn’t make it not-difficult. Are you a native English speaker? Assuming you are, grammatical gender seems like useless metadata to _you_, while keeping proper word order, perhaps, does not. But someone from a language with different grammatical rules may disagreee. Do we have anyone on the board whose native tongue uses grammatical gender? I’d like to hear from them. ---
**Author:** ![filmore](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/7993a0/32.png) [@filmore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/filmore)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2013, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388/40 "2013-03-20T22:02:39Z")
Gender is clearly useful when describing something which is genetically male or female. But it seems useless to assign a sex to inanimate objects such as a book, cloud, rock, etc. What does it matter if ‘bread’ is male or female? If it’s male, what does that tell you about bread? If it’s female, what does that tell you? Nothing, that’s what it tells you. That’s why it seems useless. If there is going to be a modifier, make it be something that conveys useful information such as size, color, quantity, etc. Saying an inanimate object is male or female is like saying an object is left or right. It’s an arbitrary label. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-languages-use-gender/653388.md?page=3)