Modern English lacks grammatical gender in the sense of all noun classes requiring masculine, feminine, or neuter inflection or agreement; however, it does retain features relating to natural gender with particular nouns and pronouns (such as woman, daughter, husband, uncle, he and she) to refer specifically to persons or animals of one or other sexes and neuter pronouns (such as it) for sexless objects.
Also, in some cases, feminine pronouns are used by some speakers when referring to ships (and more uncommonly some airplanes and analogous machinery), to churches, and to nation states and islands.
There is now large-scale use of neuter they as a third-person singular instead of the default generic he when referring to a person of unknown gender.
[2]: 6–7 Here are the discrepant nouns referring specifically to human females as listed by Jones:[2]: 7 Old English had multiple generic nouns for "woman" stretching across all three genders: for example, in addition to the neuter wif and the masculine wifmann listed above, there was also the feminine frowe.
While inflectional reduction seems to have been incipient in the English language itself, some theories suggest that it was accelerated by contact with Old Norse, especially in northern and midland dialects.
[5][6] One element of this process was the change in the functions of the words the and that (then spelt þe and þat; see also Old English determiners): previously these had been non-neuter and neuter forms respectively of a single determiner, but in this period the came to be used generally as a definite article and that as a demonstrative: both thus ceased to manifest any gender differentiation.
Nonetheless, Modern English assumes a "natural" interpretation of gender affiliation,[10] which is based on the sex, or perceived sexual characteristics, of the pronoun's referent.
Another manifestation of natural gender that continues to function in English is the use of certain nouns to refer specifically to persons or animals of a particular sex: widow/widower, postman/postwoman etc.
When the referent is a person of unknown or unspecified sex, several different options are possible: In principle, animals are triple-gender nouns, being able to take masculine, feminine and neuter pronouns.
[14] These rules also apply to other triple-gender nouns, including ideas, inanimate objects, and words like infant and child.
[14] Gendered pronouns are occasionally applied to sexless objects in English, such as ships, tools, or robots.
[19] One modern source claims that ships were treated as masculine in early English, and that this changed to feminine by the sixteenth century.
In the 1640 English Grammar, author Ben Jonson unambiguously documents the neuter gender "under which are comprised all inanimate things, a ship excepted: of whom we say she sails well, though the name be Hercules, or Henry, or the Prince.
Referring to transgender people using natural gender pronouns according to their sex deduced at birth, known as misgendering, is harmful and can be perceived as an insult or intentional offense if done deliberately, and embarrassing or hurtful if done accidentally.
Certain foreign expressions used in English exhibit distinctions of grammatical gender, for example tabula rasa.
Speakers of West Country English may use masculine (rather than neuter) pronouns with non-animate referents, as can be seen in Thomas Hardy's works.
Harold Paddock observed the following in 1981: Nouns seem to possess a well defined but covert system of grammatical gender.
Mass or non-count nouns (such as frost, fog, water, love) are called neuter because they select the pronoun it.
Nonetheless, one may find such a gender assignment less counterintuitive as nouns such as ship and boat can be referred to by the feminine pronoun in Standard English.
[32] By the 1960s and 1970s, post-structuralist theorists, particularly in France, brought wider attention to gender-neutrality theory, and the concept of supporting gender equality through conscious changes to language.
[33] Debates touched on such issues as changing the term "stewardess" to the gender-neutral "flight attendant", "fireman" to "firefighter", "mailman" to "mail carrier", and so on.
These theories have been challenged by some researchers, with attention given to additional possible social, ethnic, economic, and cultural influences on language and gender.
Features of gender-neutral language in English may include: Certain naming practices (such as the use of Mrs and Miss to distinguish married and unmarried women, respectively) may also be discouraged on similar grounds.