As intrigued as I am by languages and their backgrounds, some of their laws that are well-established in our current usage of everyday language confuse me. There are far too many language resources that seem to be obsolete, and one of them has been bothering me for the past three months, and I can't seem to get it out of my head. It is a grammatical tool as old as the Old English, and I have a fair belief that their existence is benign in and of itself. So, without further ado, let’s discuss the grammatical genders.

Grammatical gender is the concept, found in about a quarter of the world's languages, that you can sort all nouns into male or female. La or le in French. Der, die, or das in German—the das is for neuter. In Zande, which is found across a few countries in Central Africa, there are four grammatical genders: human male, human female, animate, and inanimate. There are occasional languages with even more complicated systems.

How Did Grammatical Gender Come About?

Well, for the answer to that question, we may have to go back about 6,000 years or so, to a time when people were speaking a language called—honestly, we don’t know what it was called because there are no written records of it anywhere!

But linguists are absolutely certain that it must have existed, and that it was the ancestor of most of the languages that are now spoken in Europe, and in parts of western and southern Asia. And they call it “Proto-Indo-European”. They’ve even tried to reconstruct parts of it, which is quite difficult, and there’s no way of knowing whether it’s a very accurate reconstruction, but it is based on current and historical evidence. Just to be sure, though, whenever linguists write a word in a proto-language, they use an asterisk to indicate: “Be careful — this is only a guess.”

It’s thought that originally this language had two classifications for nouns: “animate” for living things, and “inanimate” for non-living things. Certainly, the ancient Hittite language had this system: it’s extinct now, but we have written records of it, so we can be absolutely certain. But then things got complicated. Exactly what happened can’t be known for sure, but the best guess goes something like this: There was a special ending for nouns that indicated either collectives — groups of people or things — or abstract concepts. Over time, for whatever reason, people started thinking of this ending as a third category for nouns. And then they started getting confused: they started putting the wrong endings on their nouns, and hey presto! — illogical genders. Probably. It’s not the only theory, and of course we must remember there is no proof of any of this, just indirect evidence. Still, as an educated guess, it’s probably not bad.

I'm a descriptivist linguist (in which I have a democratic approach to all varieties of languages). I am not meant to judge whether language features are good or bad, I'm just meant to describe what they do. But grammatical gender for inanimate objects is just such a stupid concept. I sort of hate myself for saying that, but it's really silly. Oh, that's a computer, is it, French? So it's male. All computers are male. And that's a table, is it French? So it's female? All tables are female? Really? Should I dress it up in a pink apron and give it a rolling pin as well? (Descriptivism, Mohanad. Don't judge.)

I genuinely have tried searching the literature for any advantages of grammatical gender. There's only one vaguely convincing argument, which is that it can help clear up ambiguities and speeds up recognition of words by a small amount. Okay. But three-quarters of the world's languages manage just fine without it.

Grammatical Gender Causes a Lot of Problems

First problem: it affects the way you think. When asked to describe a key, German speakers—who classify key as male (Ein Schlüssel)—were likely to associate it with "hard," "heavy," and "jagged," whereas Spanish speakers—who classify key as female (Una llave)—were more likely to say it was "golden," "intricate," and "little". That also says a lot about gender roles in society, which I have been critical of for a long time, but that’s a topic for another discussion.

Second problem: it's really tacky. Job adverts in languages with grammatical gender have to either use both terms or a half-assed marker to clarify that they're asking for anyone. Which brings me to English.

English doesn't have grammatical gender—it used to, in Old English. We've still got a couple of words like blond and blonde that change depending on gender, but we don't have to worry about having to file everything into one box or another.

But what we do have is the third-person pronouns "he", "she", and "it". And that's a problem. Before acknowledging the value of “they” as a free for all card to call people by if you didn’t want to put yourself in dilemma, linguists had to refer to you, dear reader, by either "he” or “she". Usually, in an period book (and still today) authors opt to use “he” in most cases when referring to the third person, which is ludicrous for several reasons: one, it's an unwieldy three syllables, and it sounds awful. Two, there are folks who don't fit into, or don't want to declare as, either of those categories, and if that surprises you, you need to get out more. Since "it" is a bit dehumanising, English linguists have had to come up with a solution: "they".

I absolutely love it when Facebook and other social media platforms use "they". I signed up to Facebook way before they started asking for gender, and I've never actually told them that I'm a guy. So my friends will see "Mohanad updated their profile picture". And you know what? That sounds absolutely perfect to me. It would be much better if websites that ask for gender in the registration phase added “They” or “Choose not to tell” as an option, but I guess that will take lots of time to happen. And, as someone who currently lives in an Arab country where there are two acknowledged social genders in society and the Arabic language, I have a fair belief that “they” practically don’t and won’t exist in the dictionary when it comes to imposing gender-neutrality.

As I always remind myself, languages constantly develop and change. There are new words added to well-recognized dictionaries every month in English and other languages that are direct descendants of Latin. What I find utterly interesting about the use and development of "they" as singular is that it's kind of the same thing as what happened to "you". As in, "you" used to be exclusively plural while "thou" was exclusively singular, then "you" became both plural and singular, and "thou" got phased out. Now "they" is being used as singular too (and has been used as singular before, but in less specific cases) the only difference is it's not really phasing any other pronoun out.

Maybe it won’t be in my lifetime that I will see the eradication of grammatical genders, but I am always waiting for the world to astonish me and prove me wrong. So there you go. I've gone against my descriptivist training, and said that one linguistic trait is better than another. And I'm okay with that. Because... some objects and people are better referred to as "they”, and that’s here to stay.