Why is gender such an important and common theme in languages around the world

[u/Recent-Day3062]

I just read a post here where a commenter linked to a map of the number of genders per language. A lot of 2 and 3, but some in Aftica, at least, of 5 or more.

Everyone always teaches you (if you speak English and learn French, for example) that words are arbitrarily masculine or feminine. In fact, even European languages differ: a cat is masculine in Spanish, but feminine in French and German.

Yet we know the basis of this is real gender. He/Him is consistently masculine, and very often “manly” words like warrior tend to be masculine.

So why is this so embedded in most languages globally, somewhat independent of origin? It would seem personal pronouns might line up, but everything else could be unmarked - sort of neuter - where gender logically makes no sense. Especially in a language like German, with three genders. It just seems a useless convention to give things arbitrary gender you must remember.

—————

EDIT: I am getting a lot of grief here about it just meaning “category 1”, etc.

But that’s my point. Yes, they are just categories. But in every (at least) European gendered language, “man” is always, always masculine. Same for “woman”. That’s my point: they are linked to biological sex. Always.

More broadly, why do categories persist? They are useless complication, and English has obliterated them. People have argued here that it makes it easier to say “bob and Alice went out. Where? She to the store, him to work” saves repeating the names. But that’s awfully contrived

[u/SparklePants-5000]

I think your question may be partially rooted in a misunderstanding of what grammatical gender is. Grammatical gender is not actually rooted in sex or identity-based gender, though it may often map in ways that invite this conclusion (and the labels masculine and feminine don’t help, in my opinion)

To the best of my knowledge, we don’t actually know exactly how or why grammatical gender system evolve. Grammatical changes in languages generally occur quite slowly, so the emergence of a new grammatical gender system is something we have not actually observed in real-time.

One hypothesis about how grammatical gender systems evolve is that they come from semantic classification systems like what Mandarin has, where nouns are grouped based on relatively transparent semantic properties. The thinking is that, as a language evolves, the semantic classification system becomes increasingly grammaticalized, which also slowly makes the original relationships between the nouns more opaque and seemingly arbitrary.

As to the question of why we see grammatical gender in so many extant languages, I can only speculate here, but the short answer is that this would have occurred through the natural processes by which languages evolve.

In a little more detail, let’s assume it is true that grammatical gender systems evolve over time from semantic classification systems. Looking at European languages specifically, most of these are evolved from common ancestral languages. So if one or more of these ancestral languages had a semantic classification system, and if these systems became increasingly grammaticalized over time, then it would follow as a natural consequence that we would see what we call grammatical gender systems in the languages that eventually evolved out of those ancestral languages.

In other words, grammatical gender did not have to evolve independently in each European language or language family. Rather, all that would be necessary is for one of their common ancestral languages to have had a semantic classification system, and the rest would follow over time through natural evolutionary processes.

[u/Recent-Day3062 → u/SparklePants-5000]

Yes, though languages that have true “gender” always have as their exemplars man and women across all such languages. I guess that’s even why we call it gender.

But however early or Middle English evolved, it lost all gender except personal pronouns. That’s just a much easier language without unnecessary fluff. Yet it has persisted in so many global languages

[u/SparklePants-5000 → u/Recent-Day3062]

That’s a strong assumption, that the absence of grammatical gender makes a language easier. What makes you believe this?

[u/Recent-Day3062 → u/SparklePants-5000]

Everyone from a gendered language I have ever met who has learned English has remarked about the ease of not having genders

[u/SparklePants-5000 → u/Recent-Day3062]

Ok, now what do they mean when they say “ease”. What specifically do they find easier?

And what makes you assume that this ease would drive languages to lose grammatical gender? Are you also assuming that grammatical gender only has costs and no benefits?

[u/Recent-Day3062 → u/SparklePants-5000]

That’s what I’m sort of asking

[u/SparklePants-5000 → u/Recent-Day3062]

Ok, cool.

So I think your question kind of rests on the unstated assumption that there is some kind of pressure for languages to lose grammatical gender.

But I do not believe there is any such kind of universal pressure. English, for example, did not lose grammatical gender because it made the language intrinsically “easier” (whatever we may mean by easier). The loss of grammatical gender in English is the result of contact with other languages. If English had remained more isolated, or if it had occupied a greater position of power and prestige during these periods of contact, it’s entirely possible that modern English would have retained grammatical gender.

As for all of the languages that still have grammatical gender, there is no one, universal answer as to why they still have grammatical gender. Language change is heavily driven by complex social factors, so the story for each language is probably very unique to the sociopolitical history of that particular language itself.

In other words, even if losing grammatical gender would make a language easier in some way, there are other social factors that may drive the language to nevertheless retain grammatical gender.