Gender in English
A system of grammatical gender, whereby every noun was treated as either masculine, feminine or neuter, existed in Old English, but fell out of use during the Middle English period. Modern English retains features relating to natural gender, namely the use of certain nouns and pronouns to refer specifically to persons or animals of one or other sexes and certain others for sexless objects – although [|feminine pronouns] are sometimes used when referring to ships, to churches, and to nation states.
Some aspects of gender usage in English have been influenced by the push towards a preference for gender-neutral language. This applies in particular to avoidance of the default use of the masculine he when referring to a person of unknown gender, usually using the neuter they as a third-person singular, and avoidance of the use of certain feminine forms of nouns. Increasingly, the male form of such nouns is used for either men or women.
Gender in Old English
had a system of grammatical gender similar to that of modern German, with three genders: masculine, feminine, neuter. Determiners and attributive adjectives showed gender inflection in agreement with the noun they modified. Also the nouns themselves followed different declension patterns depending on their gender. Moreover, the third-person personal pronouns, as well as interrogative and relative pronouns, were chosen according to the grammatical gender of their antecedent.Old English grammatical gender was, as in other Germanic languages, remarkably opaque, that is, one often could not know the gender of a noun by its meaning or by the form of the word; this was especially true for nouns referencing inanimate objects. Learners would have had to simply memorize which word goes with which gender. Though nouns referring to human males were generally masculine and for the most part the masculine went with human males and the feminine went with human females, as Charles Jones noted, "it is with those nouns which show explicit female reference that the sex specifying function of the gender classification system appears to break down,..." Most words referencing human females were feminine, but there was a sizable number of words that were either neuter or even masculine. Here are the discrepant nouns referring specifically to human females as listed by Jones:
| Noun | Gender | Meaning | Modern cognates |
| æwe | neut. | "married woman" | |
| broþorwif | neut. | "brother's wife" | |
| fæmenhadesmon | masc. | "virgin" | |
| foligerwif | neut. | "prostitute" | |
| forþwif | neut. | "matron" | |
| freowif | neut. | "freewoman" | |
| hiredwifmon | masc. | "female member of a household" | |
| lærningmægden | neut. | "female pupil" | |
| mædencild | neut. | "female child" | |
| mægden | neut. | "young girl" | English maid, maiden; German das Mädchen |
| mægdenman | masc. | "virgin" | |
| mægþman | masc. | "virgin" | |
| mennenu | neut. | "handmaiden" | |
| næmenwif | neut. | "married woman" | |
| sigewif | neut. | "victorious woman" | |
| siþwif | neut. | "noble lady" | |
| unrihtwif | neut. | "mistress" | |
| wif | neut. | "woman" | English wife; German das Weib |
| wifcild | neut. | "female child" | |
| wiffreond | masc. | "female friend" | |
| wifhand | masc. | "heiress" | |
| wifmann | masc. | "woman" | English woman |
| wynmæg | neut. | "winsome maid" | |
| yrfenuma | neut. | "female heir" |
Old English had multiple generic nouns for "woman" stretching across all three genders: for example, in addition to the neuter wif and the masculine wifmann listed above, there was also the feminine frowe. For the gender-neutral nouns for "child", there was the neuter bearn and the neuter cild. And even with nouns referring to persons, one could not always determine gender by meaning or form: for example, with two words ending in -mæg, there was the female-specific neuter noun wynmæg, meaning "winsome maid" or attractive woman; as well as the gender-neutral noun meaning "paternal kindred" or member of father's side of the family, but which was grammatically feminine: fædernmæg.
For details of the declension patterns and pronoun systems, see Old English grammar.
Decline of grammatical gender
While inflectional reduction seems to have been incipient in the English language itself, some theories suggest that it was accelerated by contact with Old Norse, especially in northern and midland dialects. This correlates with the geographical extent of the viking Danelaw in the late 9th and early 10th centuries; for almost a century Norse constituted a prestige language with regard to the southern Northumbrian and east Mercian dialects of Old English.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. One element of this process was the change in the functions of the words the and that : previously these had been non-neuter and neuter forms respectively of a single determiner, but in this period the came to be used generally as a definite article and that as a demonstrative; both thus ceased to manifest any gender differentiation. The loss of gender classes was part of a general decay of inflectional endings and declensional classes by the end of the 14th century.
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. Late 14th-century London English had almost completed the shift away from grammatical gender, and Modern English retains no morphological agreement of words with grammatical gender.
Modern English
Gender is no longer an inflectional category in Modern English. The only traces of the Old English gender system are found in the system of pronoun–antecedent agreement, although this is now based on natural gender – the sex, gender identity, or perceived sexual characteristics, of the pronoun's referent. Another manifestation of natural gender that continues to function in English is the use of certain nouns to refer specifically to persons or animals of a particular sex: widow/widower, actor/actress, etc.Linguist Benjamin Whorf described grammatical gender in English as a covert grammatical category. He argued that gender as a property inherent in nouns is not entirely absent from modern English, citing given names such as "Jane" and words like "daughter", which are normally paired with gendered pronouns even if the speaker doesn't know the person being referred to. Linguist Robert A. Hall Jr. argued that these are simply examples of natural gender and not grammatical gender, as daughters are always female and people named Jane are overwhelmingly likely to be female. Moreover, if a person named Jane is a man, there is nothing grammatically incorrect with saying "Jane is bringing his friends over."
Personal pronouns
The third-person singular personal pronouns are chosen according to the natural gender of their antecedent or referent. As a general rule:- he is used when the referent is male, or something to which male characteristics are attributed;
- she is used when the referent is female, or is an object personified as female – this is common with vessels such as ships and airplanes, and sometimes with countries. An example is in God Bless America: "Stand beside her, and guide her through the night with a light from above."
- it is used when the referent is something inanimate or intangible, a non-animal life-form such as a plant, an animal of unknown sex, or, less often, a child when the sex is unspecified or deemed unimportant. It is also used in the interrogative for people in some phrases such as, "Who is it?".
When the referent is a person of unknown or unspecified sex, several different options are possible:
- use of he or she, he/she, s/he, etc.
- alternation or random mixture of she and he
- use of singular they
- use of it
- use of generic he
Transgender and non-binary people
Animals
In principle, animals are triple-gender nouns, being able to take masculine, feminine and neuter pronouns. However, animals viewed as less important to humans, also known as ‘lower animals’, are generally referred to using it; higher animals may more often be referred to using he and she, when their sex is known. If the sex of the animal is not known, the masculine pronoun is often used with a sex-neutral meaning. For example:Person A: Ah, there's an ant
Person B: Well put him outside
Animate pronouns he and she are usually applied to animals when personification and/or individuation occurs. Personification occurs whenever human attributes are applied to the noun. For example:
A widow bird sat mourning for her love.
Specifically named animals are an example of individuation, such as Peter Rabbit or Blob the Whale. In these instances, it is more likely that animate pronouns he or she will be used to represent them.
These rules also apply to other triple-gender nouns, including ideas, inanimate objects, and words like infant and child.
Metaphorical gender
Gendered pronouns are occasionally applied to sexless objects in English, such as ships, tools, or robots. This is known as metaphorical gender. This personification of objects is usually done for poetic effect or to show strong emotional attachment.Although the use of she and he for inanimate objects is not very frequent in Standard Modern English, it is fairly widespread in some varieties of English. Gender assignment to inanimate nouns in these dialects is sometimes fairly systematic. For example, in some dialects of southwest England, masculine pronouns are used for individuated or countable matter, such as iron tools, while the neuter form is used for non-individuated matter, such as liquids, fire and other substances.
One common use of metaphorical gender is referring to ships as she. This is the case even for ships named after men, such as HMS King George V; otherwise, the gender of inanimate objects with proper names tends to match the gender connotation of the name. The origins of this practice are not certain, and it is currently in decline and sometimes considered offensive. In modern English it is advised against by The Chicago Manual of Style, New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, and The Associated Press Stylebook. The Cambridge Dictionary considers the practice "old-fashioned".
The Oxford English Dictionary dates written examples of calling ships she to at least 1308, in materials translated from French, which has grammatical gender. One modern source claims that ships were treated as masculine in early English, and that this changed to feminine by the sixteenth century. In the 1640 English Grammar, author Ben Jonson unambiguously documents the neuter gender "under which are comprised all inanimate things, a ship excepted: of whom we say she sails well, though the name be Hercules, or Henry, or the Prince." Various folk theories on the origin include the tradition of naming of ships after goddesses, well-known women, female family members or objects of affection, the tradition of having a female figurehead on the front of the ship, and various justifications comparing the attributes of ships with women.
She is also sometimes used as an alternative to it for countries, when viewed as political entities.
Other pronouns
Other English pronouns are not subject to male/female distinctions, although in some cases a distinction between animate and inanimate referents is made. For example, the word who refers to a person or people, and rarely to animals, while which and what refer to inanimate things. Since these pronouns function on a binary gender system, distinguishing only between animate and inanimate entities, this suggests that English has a second gender system which contrasts with the primary gender system.It should also be noted that relative and interrogative pronouns do not encode number. This is shown in the following example:
The man who lost his head vs. the men who lost their heads
Other pronouns which show a similar distinction include everyone/everybody vs. everything, no one/nobody vs. nothing, etc.
Gender-specific words
Many words in modern English refer specifically to people or animals of a particular sex, although sometimes the specificity is being lost. Likewise, many feminine and masculine job titles have undergone a process of becoming gender-neutralised in recent decades.An example of an English word that has retained gender-specific spellings is the noun-form of blond/blonde, with the former being masculine and the latter being feminine. This distinction is retained primarily in British English.
Gender neutrality in English
Gender neutrality in English became a growing area of interest among academics during Second Wave Feminism, when the work of structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and his theories on semiotics, became more well known in academic circles. By the 1960s and 1970s, post-structuralist theorists, particularly in France, brought wider attention to gender-neutrality theory, and the concept of supporting gender equality through conscious changes to language. Feminists analyzing the English language put forward their own theories about the power of language to create and enforce gender determinism and the marginalization of the feminine. Debates touched on such issues as changing the term "stewardess" to the gender-neutral "flight attendant", "fireman" to "firefighter", "mailman" to "mail carrier", and so on. At the root of this contentiousness may have been feminists' backlash against the English language's shift from "grammatical gender" to "natural gender" during the early Modern era coinciding with the spread of institutional prescriptive grammar rules in English schools. These theories have been challenged by some researchers, with attention given to additional possible social, ethnic, economic, and cultural influences on language and gender. The impact on mainstream language has been limited, yet has led to lasting changes in practice.Features of gender-neutral language in English may include:
- Avoidance of gender-specific job titles, or caution in their use;
- Avoidance of the use of man and mankind to refer to humans in general;
- Avoidance of the use of he, him and his when referring to a person of unspecified sex.