If you’ve studied other languages, such as French or German, you’re well aware that one of the most difficult parts of learning languages that do use gender differentiation is associating the correct gender with each noun. For example, the French word for “river” can be either le fleuve (masculine) or la rivière (feminine) depending on whether it’s flowing into a body of water, or into another river, respectively. In German, a river is always gender-free, or neuter (das Fluss), although a brook is masculine (der Bach). Why, then, since much of the English language came from the same roots as the French and German languages, do we not have the same gender indicators in our language?

Well, at one time, we did – back in the Middle Ages, when our English-speaking ancestors were conversing in what we now call Anglo-Saxon, which was very closely related to the German language of the time. During the 10th century, when the British Isles were being invaded periodically by the Norse (Vikings), Anglo-Saxon began incorporating some of their vocabulary, and with the arrival of the Norman (French) contingent headed by William the Conqueror in 1066, French became an important part of the spoken language of the British Isles, and the Anglo-Norman dialect was created. However, the gender differentiation (male, female, or neuter) was still applied to nouns, in keeping with the grammatical rules of both German and French. By the mid-14th century, though, there was more of a reliance on the neutral word “the” (or “thee” as it was often spelled) to refer to a noun; this was only one of many standardizations that occurred in the English language around this time, coinciding with the adoption of the English language (rather than French) as the official language of Britain, and with the development of the printing press in 1470.

We still have a few gender-differentiated nouns in English, mostly in reference to animals:

doe (female) v. stag (male)
mare (female) v. stallion (male)
cow (female) v. bull (male)

A few professions (actor/actress, masseur/masseuse) also rely on different nouns depending on the sex of the person in that profession, and we also have gender differentiation through the use of the pronouns he/him, she/her, and it. Interestingly, it’s common for someone to use the neuter pronoun it to refer to a female animal (“That cow has a problem – it’s limping”), or to assign a gender-specific pronoun to a gender-neutral object (“I love this car – she’ll never let me down, will you, baby?”).

You can be grateful that your study of English vocabulary isn’t further complicated by having to also learn the gender of each noun!