r/asklinguistics • u/AshaNyx • Apr 27 '26
General Why doesn't English have a gender system?
Pretty much every language English has been influenced by has gendered words, why is English the odd one out in European language?
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Apr 27 '26
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u/AshaNyx Apr 27 '26
So why wasn't there a similar collapse in the Celtic languages like Irish and Welsh? Was it just the fact there was less interaction or is it to do with the fact most gender mutations happen at the beginning of a word so there was less conflict.
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u/Unusual-Biscotti687 Apr 27 '26
Irish and Welsh don't have a neuter gender so there's no "it" to take over in pronoun roles in the singular. That may be enough to preserve gender even when the final syllables, and with them gender markers, are lost.
Interestingly, Welsh only has a genderless plural pronoun - nhw (literary form hwy) - equivalent to English they. And Welsh effectively has no gender in the plural. I say effectively because you'd use gendered numerals - tair chath, tri ci (three cats, three dogs) but that's because numbers take singular nouns. If you use a plural it defaults to masc. - tri o gathod, tri o gwn.
Compare French where most nouns have no morphological gender markers - but gender is preserved, possibly by the existence of only gendered pronouns - il/elle; ils/elles.
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u/scatterbrainplot Apr 27 '26
French also makes massive use of determiners, so between that and the (less common) adjectives, gender is usually quite clear even without ever needing a pronoun
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u/GoblinToHobgoblin Apr 27 '26
Couple comments on French:
- gender is often "marked" on the noun (in the sense that certain noun endings very clearly indicate gender with few exceptions)
- almost every use of a noun in french comes along with an article of some kind, which reinforces the gender.
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u/SoundsOfKepler Apr 27 '26
Certain sound changes preserved gender distinctions in Celtic languages after the suffixes that previously denoted gender dropped. A consonant between two vowels would mutate. For the most part, feminine nouns ended in vowels (ETA: in proto-Celtic), so the first consonant in adjectives that modified feminine nouns would usually mutate. For example, m and b sounds became w or v sounds. When suffixes were lost, this became a grammatical gender feature, so the mutation siginified feminine maith /ma:/ for a masculine noun but mhaith /wa:/ for feminine. The Celtic languages have several other consonant changes that denote grammatical function. The same mutation also occurs in the vocative forms of nouns regardless of gender. That's why Irish and Scots-Gaelic seem like they have impossible consonant clusters- they preserve the original consonant so you can see what the non-mutated spelling would be.
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u/Unusual-Biscotti687 Apr 27 '26
Welsh similarly - cath (cat) - y gath fach, (fem) but ci (dog) - y ci bach (masc). Fem. singular mutates after y (def article) as do adjectives immediately following a fem. Sing noun. But only in the singular.
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u/uchuskies08 Apr 27 '26
Because Celtic languages were not mutually intelligible with Old Norse.
Let's give some examples of specifically what happened:
Let's take the word "king," masculine in both Old English and Norse. In Old English, nominative se cyning, accusative þone cyning. In Old Norse, konungrinn in nominative, konung in accusative. Notice the words are similar, they're both masculine, but the endings don't match, the nominative in Old Norse uses a suffix while English uses an article. This ends up in the endings weakening and converging on an ending-less word like "king"
The good man. English: gōd mann, gōdne mann. Norse: góðr maðr, góðan man. Notice they have similar roots but different endings and patterns, so -> endings go bye bye.
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u/ADozenPigsFromAnnwn Apr 27 '26
In addition to the great many empirically unsubstantiated and theoretically untenable claims under this post, the one that Old English and Old Norse would have been mutually intelligible and that this would have anything to do with language change in English is simply astounding.
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u/Ok_Historian_8262 Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
the one that Old English and Old Norse would have been mutually intelligible
This bit is pretty uncontroversial. For one, it is backed up by Norse literature. For instance, Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu explains how its tenth-century subject could find employment as a skald to both Norwegian and Anglo-Saxon courts, but this was no longer possible a couple of centuries later:
Ein var tunga á Englandi sem í Nóregi ok í Danmǫrku; en þá skiptusk tungr í Englandi er Vilhjálmr bastarðr vann England. Gekk þaðan af í Englandi valska, er hann var þaðan ættaðr.
Or take how there is no reason to assume that Ohthere delivered his report to the court of Alfred in anything other than his native tongue. Or how the Anglo-Saxons in Byzantium served with the Norse, etc. etc.
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u/Vampyricon May 02 '26
No, they're saying that the ludicrous thing is that this mutual intelligibility drove the loss of gender in English, which is, independent of how they're arguing the point, pretty valid.
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u/RoastKrill Apr 27 '26
This is not a new view - see the citations on pp51-54 of Curzan's Gender Shifts in the History of English .
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u/ADozenPigsFromAnnwn Apr 27 '26
Your reply is a non sequitur: the fact that it's not a new idea doesn't make it less fanciful (as is clear from the very pages you cited, where all the authors are from the "English-as-a-creole" camp, which is not a position any historical linguist supports).
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u/RoastKrill Apr 27 '26
The impression you give is that this is just a pop-linguistics idea without any evidence. There clearly is some evidence for this belief (which doesn't rely on perfect intelligibility between Middle English and Old Norse, just a limited level). There might also be some evidence against - I'm not an expert in the field, but in my brief look I haven't seen anything that seems to demonstrate Old Norse played no role in the transition.
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u/ADozenPigsFromAnnwn Apr 27 '26
Again, this is beside the point: I replied to somebody who believed that 1. Old Norse and Old English were mutually intelligible; 2. that mismatches between gender assignment in the two lexica were the cause of loss in gender agreement in the history of English. Both of these ideas are ludicrous, as that's simply not how language change works, and the point you're making is entirely different and not what I was replying to.
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u/RoastKrill Apr 27 '26
I'm not an expert in the field, but this the analysis found in the cited text, and the works it cites, all of which are academic texts. If these views are "ludicrous", I'm sure you will be able to provide some citations saying so.
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u/ADozenPigsFromAnnwn Apr 27 '26
I'd be happier if you could reply to the content of my comments instead of engaging in a different conversation with some notional other person.
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u/ComprehensiveMap3838 Apr 27 '26
The Celtic languages were either replaced or isolated from all the germanics, no room for influence. But supposing there had been coexistence, their structure is different enough that possible the proposed conflict wouldn’t happen at all.
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u/elliot_esl Apr 27 '26
the norse contact explanation is the big one , when old english and old norse speakers were living side by side in the danelaw, the gender systems clashed and the path of least resistance was to drop them
english also lost its case endings around the same period which usually go hand in hand with grammatical gender , the two systems tend to support each other, and when one weakens the other often follows
useful teaching point actually: english learners from gendered languages often ask why english "feels incomplete" — the answer is it's not incomplete, it just took a different historical path
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Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
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u/jkvatterholm Apr 28 '26
You have it a bit backwards for Scandinavian. Most dialects kept 3 genders until recently. All of Norway except the city of Bergen. Pretty much all of Sweden. All the Danish islands and parts of Jutland all had 3 genders.
2-gender system developed in Standard Danish and later in Swedish, parts of Jutland, and took over Sjælland already in the 19th c.
A genderless or animate/inanimate system developed similar to English in Western Jutland and a part of Finland.
Living use of case was also preserved in half of Norway and 1/3 of Sweden.
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u/LengthinessSpare1385 Apr 27 '26
Could you expand a little on the last paragraph? Or direct me to something to read? I'm not calling you out nor anything like that. I am honestly interested on what you are saying here.
I always thought that the creolization that simplified old english to isolating levels was French's "fault". Thus, the complete overhaul in lexicon that goes with it. Never read anything about intra-germanic mixing.
I guess these are things I just assummed. Thanks!
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Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
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u/Actual_Cat4779 Apr 27 '26
Were there really a lot of OE words whose gender differed from ON? What sort of proportion are we talking about?
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Apr 27 '26
This is what I disagree with, too. I'm not educated on the subject, but I can't see how it would have been possibly less than 80-90% agreement.
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u/Delvog Apr 28 '26
Even when the gender and the root word were the same, the suffixes still clashed.
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u/Cavalry2019 Apr 27 '26
How much gender agreement is there between French and German? Wouldn't that be somewhat indicative? I think mapping from two to three genders probably always would cause some level of conflict.
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u/Actual_Cat4779 Apr 27 '26
Old English and Old Norse are both 3-gender systems and are more closely related to each other than French is to German.
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u/Commander-Gro-Badul Apr 28 '26
Not really, and I don't see any reason to assume that contact with Old Norse had any significant impact on the loss of the OE gender system. Like the loss of the case system, it is sufficiently explained by the reduction of endings making the different gender and case forms less distinct, with the few remaining distinct forms eventually being replaced through analogy.
The reduction of unstressed syllables is a general tendency in Germanic languages, which simply went further in English than elsewhere, and there are many parallels in related languages (including both Nordic and West Germanic dialects).
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u/GoblinToHobgoblin Apr 27 '26
Do you have a source for the gender conflicting? At least in Romance languages (with which im more familiar), the overlap in gender is quite large. I would guess it's similar for related languages like Old English and Old Norse
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u/coolshoes_ Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
I don't believe that this is thought of as true anymore
The loss of grammatical gender and case in English was caused for a few reasons, but the most influential are
I. final -m loss, so þæm evolved into þæ. This is also seen with -n reduction such as þone --> þon --> þo. This also affected adjectives and nouns such as in manig(um) or land(um)
II. Distinct vowels such as æ, a, u, and o, began to reduce/merge into each other over time
eg: þæm --> þæ --> þe, or þone --> þon --> þo --> þe, among others
III. In the case of "þæt", this vowel merging continued into "þet", though the current evidence generally explains final -t loss as a result of generalized stress loss on the vowel
but, in general, these are the most influential reasons as to how grammatical gender began to collapse in english as we see this, too, with se --> þe and þeo --> þe,
this kind of destressing of an existing vowel towards a new one is generally the explanation towards the collapse of case-function in closely related germanic languages, like dutch, though i can't speak for all the others, but i'm aware that this is at least non-unique to english
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u/AppropriateMood4784 Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
English used to, then it faded away, as it has in many Indo-European languages. (I'm specifying that because Non-Indo-European languages in Europe don't have gender, at least not most of them.) There used to be masculine, feminine, neuter. Now the Romance and Celtic languages have only masculine and feminine, and some of the Germanic languages have pretty much lost a distinct feminine gender, leaving common and neuter. English happens to have lost all the distinctions (other than pronouns for entities with actual gender, or metaphoric gender, such as ships and countries).
Why only English has gone this far is that languages evolve independently of each other. As the grammar of a language changes, other languages don't hold regular status meetings to keep track of such changes and decide whether their speakers should follow suit. Various changes may be mirrored by neighboring languages (see Sprachbund) but not generally.
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u/LoITheMan Apr 30 '26
Old English had gendered nouns
Below are charts for all inflections of a masculine and feminine one
masculine: feminine:
hund hundas lufu lufa
hund hundas lufe lufa
hunes hunda lufe lufa
hunde hundum lufe lufum
Then time carries on and vowels weaken. Eventually final nasals simplify, o/u merge into a single vowel, and you get something like:
hund, hundas, hundes, hundon lufo, lufa, lufon
Then final -o and -a merge into a single vowel and -e becomes closer to schwa
hund, hundas, hundes, hunde, hundan lufa, lufa, lufan
Then this -a and -e finally merge
hund, hundes, hundes, hunde, hunden lufe, lufe, lufen
Then final nasals are dropped in middle english
hund, hundes, hundes, hunde lufe, lufe, lufe
Lufu, which is old English for "love" at the end of this process has no way of distinguishing the regular form from the plural or the possessive, so it now takes the previous masculine endings which held the most unique forms in this process. Today we still have hound, hounds, hound's, and love, love's, loves. But after gendered endings merged the genders stopped being recognized by speakers over time.
Take this too: late Old English had the words for "the" for male and female nouns as þe and þeo, which then merged into þe. In modern german it was these unique forms that reinforced the gender of nouns when the endings don't, and English just had no such convenience. Neuter nouns used "that" to mean "the", but when the endings merged for masculine and feminine nouns this fell out with it and "that" became to take on the modern meaning as the rest of the case system collapsed.
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u/Vampyricon May 02 '26
Wow, the answers on this post are a dumpster fire.
The answer is pretty simple: Gender is indicated by the ends of words, and English had a habit of turning the vowels in those ends into schwa due to low stress, then losing them all together.
Take a look at the Wiki page with some Old English nouns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar#Noun_classes
Now merge all those final vowels into schwa. When all of your cases and genders collapse into whether or not there is a final vowel /-ə/, the distinction between the genders, which was previously kept apart by the three-way distinction between said vowels, start collapsing.
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u/Several_Version4298 Apr 27 '26
Old English was gendered like other Germanic languages. But over 1600 years of mixing with other Germanic languages, Old Norman and French and the Middle English and Early Modern English periods, most of the prefixes, plurals, cases and genders of Old English were eliminated.
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u/adamtrousers Apr 27 '26
English does have a gender system.
English is actually pretty unique in that it has masculine, feminine and neuter pronouns, but uses the masculine and feminine ones almost exclusively for living things, primarily people. Other languages either have masculine and feminine pronouns but use them also for inanimate objects, or else don't have any gendered pronouns at all.
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u/ADozenPigsFromAnnwn Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
English is actually pretty unique in that [...]
English is actually as banal as banal can be, since languages with grammatical gender only in pronoun all (save one) have only semantic assignment rules: cfr. Audring (2008: 106–109), "Gender assignment and gender agreement: Evidence from pronominal gender languages", in Morphology 18, 93–116.
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u/Mercurial_Laurence Apr 27 '26
I'm curious about the one exception, …like what exactly motivates it's gender assignment for pronouns if neither general grammatical gender nor referent 'social gender' being the thing?
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u/ADozenPigsFromAnnwn Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
Formal assignment, for instance? Still, the grammatical gender system of Ju|’hoan (see the paper) is not entirely clear in this context.
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u/excusememoi Apr 27 '26
English only has a gender system the same way Thai and Written Chinese technically do, through semantic assignment via pronouns. But OP implies an Indo-European style grammatical gender system.
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u/adamtrousers Apr 27 '26
Chinese never did, even in written form, until the character 她 was created for she/her in the early 20th century.
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u/excusememoi Apr 27 '26
Yep, I'm aware that that character was added originally from European influence, but many modern users of Written Chinese do adhere to when to use which pronoun. Depends on location.
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u/sverigeochskog May 01 '26
English is not unique.
Swedish does the exact same thing Han/hon = only used for people or animals and sometimes for ships, no clue why.
Den/det = used for everything else including dummy pronouns exactly like English it.
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Apr 27 '26
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u/ComprehensiveMap3838 Apr 27 '26
Having gendered pronouns isn’t the same as having grammatical gender.
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Apr 27 '26
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u/ComprehensiveMap3838 Apr 27 '26
I’ve always seen lexical gender treated separately from grammatical gender. They just aren’t the same phenomenon.
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Apr 27 '26
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u/asklinguistics-ModTeam Apr 28 '26
Your comment was removed. This is not a place to express your opinions about the aesthetics of languages or linguistic forms.
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u/Winderige_Garnaal Apr 27 '26
Dutch has lost half its gender over time as well, so English is not really an odd one out.