Lucy
ACME Canine Unit
I took a break, but my curiosity definitely didn’t. It pulled me somewhere unexpected—straight into the world of language and gendered nouns. That rabbit hole turned out to be surprisingly fascinating. I’ve loved learning languages for as long as I can remember. Even as a kid, I liked listening to how people spoke and trying to imitate them, and I still remember how to sign the alphabet.
I don’t know a lot of vocabulary in the languages I’m exploring yet, but I’ve learned enough to notice a pattern: languages like German and Spanish have grammatical gender—masculine, feminine, and sometimes neutral—while English doesn’t. English uses gender very differently. We only see it in certain words, like waiter and waitress, or when people refer to a ship as “she.”
I wondered why this difference existed, and I learned that the loss of grammatical gender in English was part of a major internal collapse of the Old English inflectional system. Contact with other languages—especially Norse—seems to have sped up that process in some regions, while French influence played a more indirect role.
I also learned something surprising: English pronouns didn’t lose gender completely—they just shifted where gender shows up. Old English once had grammatical gender for almost every noun, and its pronoun system worked different too. When that gender system collapsed, English kept only the natural-gender pronouns we recognize today: “he,” “she,” and “they.” This change simplified the language enormously, but it also opened the door for something unique—English eventually revived the singular they, something many languages with strict gender systems can’t easily do.
After learning all this, my next question was: If English had kept gender, what would it sound like today? I asked some family members who know a lot about linguistics, and they told me that at this point, we can only theorize what modern English would look or sound like if gendered nouns had survived.
So I kept digging. I wanted to know which languages have grammatical gender and which ones don’t.
That’s when I discovered languages like Swahili, which has sixteen to eighteen noun classes. Many Niger–Congo languages have more than ten. Meanwhile, languages such as Turkish, Finnish, and Mandarin don’t have grammatical gender at all.
Then I came across Japanese. While it doesn’t have grammatical gender per se, it does have gendered ways of speaking. Japanese men and women often use different words or phrasing—not because of grammar, but because of long-standing cultural tradition.
Examples:
Gendered Pronouns (I / me / my)
Masculine
I don’t know a lot of vocabulary in the languages I’m exploring yet, but I’ve learned enough to notice a pattern: languages like German and Spanish have grammatical gender—masculine, feminine, and sometimes neutral—while English doesn’t. English uses gender very differently. We only see it in certain words, like waiter and waitress, or when people refer to a ship as “she.”
I wondered why this difference existed, and I learned that the loss of grammatical gender in English was part of a major internal collapse of the Old English inflectional system. Contact with other languages—especially Norse—seems to have sped up that process in some regions, while French influence played a more indirect role.
I also learned something surprising: English pronouns didn’t lose gender completely—they just shifted where gender shows up. Old English once had grammatical gender for almost every noun, and its pronoun system worked different too. When that gender system collapsed, English kept only the natural-gender pronouns we recognize today: “he,” “she,” and “they.” This change simplified the language enormously, but it also opened the door for something unique—English eventually revived the singular they, something many languages with strict gender systems can’t easily do.
After learning all this, my next question was: If English had kept gender, what would it sound like today? I asked some family members who know a lot about linguistics, and they told me that at this point, we can only theorize what modern English would look or sound like if gendered nouns had survived.
So I kept digging. I wanted to know which languages have grammatical gender and which ones don’t.
That’s when I discovered languages like Swahili, which has sixteen to eighteen noun classes. Many Niger–Congo languages have more than ten. Meanwhile, languages such as Turkish, Finnish, and Mandarin don’t have grammatical gender at all.
Then I came across Japanese. While it doesn’t have grammatical gender per se, it does have gendered ways of speaking. Japanese men and women often use different words or phrasing—not because of grammar, but because of long-standing cultural tradition.
Examples:
Gendered Pronouns (I / me / my)
Masculine
- 俺 (ore) — very masculine, casual, confident
- 僕 (boku) — masculine but softer, polite, used by boys and gentle men
- 自分 (jibun) — very masculine/military-ish, used by athletes or soldiers
- あたし (atashi) — casual feminine
- わたし (watashi) — socially feminine in casual speech, neutral in polite speech
- うち (uchi) — feminine and regional (common in Kansai)
I’ll stop here for today, but I’ll be back soon with the next part. Hope you enjoyed it.
