Yes, English Does Have Grammatical Gender (Sort Of)

Grammatical gender is a kind of noun class system that exists in many languages, in which nouns are said to possess a certain, inherent “gender” and articles, adjectives, and/or pronouns applied to these nouns are declined to match the gender of the noun. To illustrate, in Ancient Greek, the noun πόλεμος (pólemos), meaning “war,” is considered masculine, so it takes the masculine form of the article, which is ὁ (ho). If you wanted to describe the war as, say, “savage,” you would use the masculine form of the adjective with this meaning, which is ἄγριος (agrios). Thus, you would end up with the phrase ὁ ἄγριος πόλεμος, which means “the savage war.”

The grammatical gender of a noun may or may not correspond to the natural gender of the person or thing to whom it refers. For instance, the Modern High German word for “girl” or “young woman” is Mädchen, which is grammatically neuter, even though the subject’s natural gender would obviously be feminine, because it is a diminutive of the more archaic word Magd, and all diminutives in German are neuter.

It is often stated as objective fact that Modern English has “no grammatical gender.” This is not, however, entirely true. Modern English does, in fact, have grammatical gender to some extent, but it is very limited compared to other Indo-European languages, and a noun’s grammatical gender usually corresponds to the natural gender of the person or thing to whom it refers.

The Old English inflectional noun class system

The impression that Modern English does not have grammatical gender partly stems from the fact that most English nouns are not inflected for gender. This is largely the result of the more general deterioration of the complicated inflectional noun class system that existed in Old English, the form of the English language that was spoken from around the mid-fifth century CE until the eleventh century CE.

In Old English, just like in many other Indo-European languages, such as Ancient Greek, Latin, and Modern High German, there were three grammatical genders (i.e., feminine, masculine, and neuter). As in these other languages, a noun’s grammatical gender did not necessarily correlate with its natural gender. For instance, the Modern English word woman comes from the Old English word wīfmann, which has the same meaning, but is grammatically masculine. Similarly, the word wīf, which means “woman,” and the word mæġden, which means “girl” or “maiden,” are both grammatically neuter.

There were also five inflected noun cases in Old English: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental. Each noun took a different case depending on how it was used in a sentence. I won’t try to list all the different case usages here, but, generally speaking, the nominative case was used if the noun was the subject of the sentence, the accusative was used if the noun was the direct object of a verb, the genitive was used to indicate the possessor of something, the dative was used if the noun was the indirect object of a verb, and the instrumental was used to indicate a thing that is used to perform the action of a verb (making it similar to the ablative case in Latin).

ABOVE: Screenshot from Wiktionary showing the full declension of the article in Old English, with all its various forms in the singular and plural numbers, masculine, feminine, and neuter genders, and nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental cases

Modern English nouns, articles, and pronouns

The Old English noun class system broke down during the Middle English period, which is conventionally said to have lasted from the Norman conquest of England in 1066 until around the year 1500 or thereabouts. The Modern English article the has no inflectional forms whatsoever, and most Modern English nouns only have two inflectional forms: an uninflected form that is used for most purposes and a possessive form (which, for nouns, is all that remains of the Old English genitive).

Some nouns do have different forms that are applied to subjects of different genders, such as goddess/god, priestess/priest, princess/prince, sorceress/sorcerer, actress/actor, waitress/waiter, hostess/host, stewardess/steward, poetess/poet, adulteress/adulterer, tigress/tiger, and lioness/lion. Differently-gendered forms especially tend to occur in nouns borrowed from other languages like Latin, such as dominatrix/dominator, gladiatrix/gladiator, and fellatrix/fellator. These forms, though, are nearly always used to correspond with natural gender.

ABOVE: Engraving made by the Dutch artist Lucas van Leyden in around 1520, depicting the famous apocryphal legend of the dominatrix Phyllis forcing the philosopher Aristotle to let her bridle him and ride on his back as though he were a horse

Modern English gender-inflected adjectives

Most Modern English adjectives have no inflectional forms, but a few adjectives borrowed from other languages are sometimes gender-inflected. Notably, the word blond, which is borrowed from French, is traditionally inflected for the gender of the person it describes. When it is applied to a male person, it is traditionally spelled blond and, when it is applied to a female person, it is spelled blonde. A similar situation applies to the word Latina/-o, which is borrowed from Spanish and is therefore inflected as Latino when it is applied to a male person and as Latina when it is applied to a female person.

These occasional gender-inflected adjectives traditionally lack gender-neutral forms, which can create difficulties in some situations. In the case of the word blond, there is a growing tendency to use one spelling or the other gender-neutrally. I personally normally use the spelling blond, since it is closest to the word’s actual pronunciation, regardless of the gender of the person I am describing.

In the case of the word Latina/-o, some people have coined the gender-neutral inflection Latinx. I am told, however, that this word is widely despised and ridiculed among actual Spanish speakers and many Spanish speakers actually consider it outright offensive. Perhaps the best solution, then, might be to simply avoid using any form of the word whatsoever when describing, say, a group of people that includes both males and females or when describing a singular subject that is non-binary or of unspecified gender and instead use an alternative term without gender inflection, like “Latin American.”

ABOVE: Roman mosaic from the Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily, dating to the fourth century CE, depicting two blond women exercising (left) and Attic red-figure vase painting by the Berlin Painter dating to between c. 500 and c. 490 BCE, depicting the young man Ganymedes with blond hair (right)

Gendered pronouns

Modern English personal pronouns typically have three case forms: nominative (e.g., I, she, he, who), genitive (e.g., mine, hers, his, whose), and accusative/dative (e.g., me, her, him, whom). Third-person singular personal pronouns even still regularly exist in feminine, masculine, and neuter forms (i.e., she, he, and it respectively). Thus, it is actually possible to create a table of the various forms of the third-person personal pronoun in each gender, number, and case.

Nowadays, in English, gendered third-person singular personal pronouns are most commonly used to correspond to a person or thing’s natural gender or lack thereof. Typically, women and girls are called “she,” men and boys are called “he,” and inanimate objects are called “it.”

ABOVE: Table I made showing the forms of the Modern English third-person personal pronoun

Uses of gendered pronouns that don’t correspond with natural gender

Occasionally, though, people do use feminine or masculine pronouns to refer to things that don’t have any natural gender. Most notably, people (especially men) often refer to ships, boats, cars, and, in some contexts, machines using feminine pronouns.

The implication behind this usage usually seems to be that the ship, boat, car, or machine in question is a thing of beauty for a man to love or admire in the same way that he might love or admire a woman. (We won’t delve too deeply into how this usage is rather sexist, since it frames women as objects meant for male love or admiration, rather than autonomous human beings with their own thoughts and feelings.)

There is also a longstanding tradition, especially in patriotic discourse, of referring to countries using feminine pronouns. You might, for instance, occasionally hear someone refer to the United States as “she,” such as in the lyrics of the patriotic song “God Bless America” by Irving Berlin, which contains the line “. . . stand beside her and guide her . . .,” referring to the U.S. (Incidentally, the U.S. has traditionally been personified as a woman, who is given the name “Columbia.”)

ABOVE: Illustration from the cover of the political magazine Puck for 6 April 1901 showing the U.S. personified as Columbia

Conclusion

It’s true that, unlike many other languages like Ancient Greek, Latin, Spanish, German, or French, Modern English does not have a fully developed system of grammatical gender distinct from natural gender that applies to all nouns. Nonetheless, aspects of grammatical gender are still present in the language.