Q: Why did grammatical gender ever develop in the first place, and to what purpose? English lost it centuries ago, apparently to no ill effect.
A: Grammatical gender, a system for categorizing nouns into classes, is believed to have first appeared in speech in ancient times, before the existence of written language. So there’s no record of why it developed, but linguists have suggested several possibilities.
The most common theory is that grammatical gender originally consisted of two classes—animate and inanimate—and they evolved into various other classes, such as masculine, feminine, and neuter.
For most European and some Asian languages, this evolution is thought to have taken place in Proto-Indo-European (PIE), a reconstructed prehistoric language believed spoken from about 4500 B.C. to 2500 B.C.
Why, you ask, did grammatical gender develop in the first place? Well, a system for categorizing nouns into classes may have been especially helpful in ancient times, when some terms that we now consider inanimate had both animate and inanimate versions.
In Indo-European Language and Culture (2010), the historical linguist Benjamin W. Fortson has a good example of how two of the fundamental types of matter in ancient times had animate and inanimate forms:
“An interesting fact of the reconstructed PIE lexicon is that ‘fire’ and ‘water’ could each be expressed by different terms, one of animate gender and one of inanimate gender; this has been taken to reflect two conceptions of fire and water, as animate beings and as substances.”
English, like other Germanic languages, originally had grammatical gender. In Old English, a noun could be masculine, feminine, or neuter. However, grammatical gender fell out of favor in the late Old English and early Middle English of the 11th to 13th centuries.
English now has natural gender, a system in which nouns and pronouns are gendered if they correspond to a biological sex (words like “mother,” “father,” “aunt,” “uncle,” “he,” “she”). A few figurative exceptions include referring to a ship or favorite car as “she.”
The noun “gender” has been used since the 14th century to mean grammatical gender, and since the 15th in the sense of males or females as a group, as we say in a 2025 post.
When “sex” first appeared in the 14th century, it referred to the male or female categories. It wasn’t until the end of the 19th century that “sex” also came to mean the sexual act.
And as we note in our earlier post, that led to the increasing use of “gender” in place of “sex” for the biological categories.
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