A system of grammatical gender, by means of which all noun classes required an explicitly masculine, feminine, or neuter inflection or agreement, existed in Old English, but fell out of use during the Middle English period. Thus, Modern English largely does not have grammatical gender in this sense. However, it does retain features relating to natural gender, with particular nouns and pronouns (such as woman, daughter, husband, uncle, he and she) to refer specifically to persons or animals of a particular sex, and neuter pronouns (such as it for animals and sexless objects and they, someone and you for situations with non-explicit or indeterminate gender). Also, in some cases, feminine pronouns are used by some speakers when referring to ships (and more uncommonly some airplanes and analogous machinery), churches, nation states and islands.
Usage in English has evolved with regard to an emerging preference for gender-neutral language. There is now large-scale use of they as a third-person singular pronoun instead of the traditional generic he when referring to a person of unknown gender. Certain traditional feminine forms of nouns (such as authoress and poetess) are also increasingly avoided, with the male form of such nouns (author and poet) having become gender-neutral.Stevenson, Angus (ed.) (2010). Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd Ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, p. 598. .
Gender in Old English
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 has which gender. Although nouns referring to human males were generally masculine and for the most part words for human females were feminine, 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. (of a woman) "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. (of a woman) "virgin" mægþman masc. (of a woman) "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 and the masculine listed above, there was also the feminine . For the gender-neutral nouns for "child", there was the neuter and the neuter (compare English child). 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 , 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: .
In short, inanimate objects are frequently referred to by gendered pronouns, and, conversely, there exist nouns referring to people having a grammatical gender that does not match their natural gender. Nonetheless, in Old English, pronouns may follow natural gender rather than grammatical gender in some cases. 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:: "[T]he major gender shift for inanimate nouns in written texts occurs in late Old English/early Middle English, but the seeds of change are already present in Old English before 1000 AD." the Middle English of the 13th century was in transition to the loss of a gender system.: "[G]rammatical gender remained healthy in the personal pronouns through late Old English; it is not until early Middle English that the balance of gender concord in the pronouns tips towards natural gender, at least in the written language." One element of this process was the change in the functions of the words the and that (then spelt þe and þat; see also Old English determiners): 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.Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002). Traces of the Old English gender system are found in the system of pronouns. Nonetheless, Modern English assumes a "natural" interpretation of gender affiliation, which is based on the sex, or perceived sexual characteristics, of the pronoun's referent. Exceptions to this generality are few and debatable, for example anaphoric she referring to ships, machines, and countries (see below). 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, postman/postwoman etc.
Linguist Benjamin Whorf described grammatical gender in English as a covert grammatical category. He argued that gender as a property inherent in nouns (rather than in their referents) 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 does not know the person being referred to.Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1945). 'Grammatical Categories', Language 21: 1–11. 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 (and its related forms him, himself, his) is used when the referent is male, or something to which male characteristics are attributed; she (and her, herself, hers) 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 (and itself, its) 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?".
Pronoun agreement is generally with the natural gender of the referent (the person or thing denoted) rather than simply the antecedent (a noun or noun phrase which the pronoun replaces). For example, one might say either the doctor and his patients or the doctor and her patients, depending on one's knowledge or assumptions about the sex of the doctor in question, as the phrase the doctor (the antecedent) does not itself have any specific natural gender. Also, pronouns are sometimes used without any explicit antecedent. However, as described above (the example with child and daughter), the choice of pronoun may also be affected by the particular noun used in the antecedent.
(When the antecedent is a collective noun, such as family or team, and the pronoun refers to the members of the group denoted rather than the group as a single entity, a plural pronoun may be chosen: compare the family and its origins; the family and their breakfast-time arguments. See also synesis.)
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 and (s)he alternation or random mixture of she and he use of singular they use of it (normally only considered when the referent is a young child) use of generic he (traditional, but not recommended by modern grammars)
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 (domestic) 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 a spider
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 (as opposed to natural or grammatical gender). This personification of objects is usually done for poetic effect or to show strong emotional attachment.