1005: Loss of Gender (g.w.6) Sep 9, 2017

It is easy to look at languages like Latin or Old English—now no longer used—that were heavily inflected and each had three genders, and assume that because modern descendants thereof have either lost all or most of those attributes, languages have a tendency to lose gender, or other morphological (or morphophonological) features. Indeed, looking at the way that Indo-European languages have evolved over time, that trend is fairly consistent. Most linguist assume, however, that Proto-Indo-European was both gendered and heavily inflected, so realistically the most likely way it could have evolved was to lose some of that. This did not happen all at one time though, and the loss of gender in English took several centuries, starting in the north of England around the tenth century. At the time of the Norman invasions, many English speaking communities still had gender, which would often be influenced by the Norman French, such as the gender of 'se mona' ('the moon') which started as masculine but became feminine due to the influence of the Norman French 'lune' ('the moon'), before gender was eventually lost. It is theoretically possible that English could regain gender, perhaps on its own, or with influences from other languages like Spanish, which has already had a noticeable impact on certain American dialects, but there is no real way to predict any of this.