What I learned while away...

[Lucy]

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

• 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

Feminine

• 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.

 

[Lucy]

As I kept looking across different languages, it became clear to me that there isn’t one universal way of handling gender — or the absence of it. Some languages build it into grammar, some avoid it entirely, and others handle it through context or convention instead. Each system seems to arrive at its own solution.

Mandarin was the next language I was drawn to, because it’s often described as not having grammatical gender. But that turned out to be only partly true. In spoken Mandarin, there’s no distinction — the same word is used regardless of gender. In writing, however, different characters are used. That initially confused me. How could a language distinguish gender in writing but not in speech?

What I found was that this distinction is relatively recent, shaped by translation needs and historical contact with Western languages.

By the time I’d worked through these examples, I felt comfortable with one conclusion: languages don’t all solve this the same way — and they don’t need to.

But one question kept returning for me, especially when I thought about German. If English once had grammatical gender and later lost it, why didn’t German follow the same path? What made English simplify in that direction, while German kept its system intact?

The answer turned out to be simpler than I expected. German didn’t keep grammatical gender for cultural reasons — it kept it because the rest of its grammar still relies on it.

English simplified in a different direction, and once that happened, grammatical gender stopped being necessary. Seeing that helped everything else fall into place. The differences between languages weren’t contradictions at all — they were just different solutions shaped by different histories.