Grammatical Gender - Gender in English

Gender in English

While grammatical gender was a fully productive inflectional category in Old English, Modern English has a much less pervasive gender system, primarily based on natural gender.

There are a few traces of gender marking in Modern English:

• Some loanwords inflect according to gender, such as actor/actress, or blond/blonde.
• The third person singular pronouns (and their possessive forms) are gender specific: "he/his" (masculine gender, overall used for males), "she/her(s)" (feminine gender, for females), "it/its" (neuter gender, mainly for objects and abstractions), "one/one's" (common gender, for anyone or anything).

But these are insignificant features compared to a typical language with grammatical gender:

• English has no live productive gender markers. An example is the suffix -ette (of French provenance), but it is seldom used, and mostly with disparaging or humorous intent.
• The English nouns that inflect for gender are a very small minority, typically loanwords from non-Germanic languages (the suffix -ress in the word "actress", for instance, derives from Latin -rix via French -rice). Feminine forms of Latin-derived words may also use -rix, as in aviatrix.
• The third-person singular forms of the personal pronouns are the only modifiers that inflect according to gender.

It is also noteworthy that, with few exceptions, the gender of an English pronoun coincides with the real gender of its referent, rather than with the grammatical gender of its antecedent, frequently different from the former in languages with true grammatical gender. The choice between "he", "she" and "it" invariably comes down to whether they designate a male or female human or animal of a known sex, or something else.