Journal Entry 2: Why Do Languages Have Gender? by Lexicon Valley Podcast

Fig. 1. Still from Lexicon Valley.

      I am a new listener of Lexicon Valley Podcast, and I ran across an episode with a subject that seemed very interesting and answered a question I hadn’t previously thought to ask. Why do languages have gender, and more importantly, why doesn’t the English language have that?      
     

     Having an advantage of being bilingual in Spanish, I was instantly struck with this question and realized it had never occurred to me that English doesn’t follow the same pattern of adding gender to nouns.

First, Some Rules:

 

Lexicon Valley Podcast’s host, John McWhorter, tackles this question expertly. In some languages, gender is divided between masculine and feminine, and some gender rules in some languages makes sense.     
     McWhorter continues and states that the gendered feminine and masculine nouns make sense when they are added to nouns biologically – take animals for example, that are differentiated by being male or female.

    
     So, in Spanish, masculine gendered nouns typically end in –o, while feminine gendered nouns usually end in –a.

         

 

 

 

owever, there is another instance where gendered nouns are used for objects and that is governed by grammatical rules – which simply means someone, somewhere decided that particular object should be feminine or masculine and everyone else agreed with them. There isn’t any rhyme or reasoning behind why these items or objects have the gender they are assigned. But why is that?       
       
   Why is there even gender in language? Well, McWhorter states that there is no written documentation of language explaining gender because language happened before writing was ever invented. In essence, it was just there.

 

Exceptions

 

 

owever, there are exceptions to this rule, something McWhorter calls “dum-dum language” rules, or something that doesn’t make sense: One such exception in the Spanish language is the word for ‘hand’ which is ‘la mano’. La (which ends in –a  is feminine, and yet ‘mano’ which ends in –o, is masculine. When formed together, though, it becomes feminine – la mano.        
       
       
What About English?

 

 

 

o why doesn’t English follow these rules several European languages have? Why doesn’t English have gender? McWhorter states it has to do with the origination of the English language and the conflict that arose long ago.         
        

     When Scandinavian invaders, who spoke Old Norse, took over those who spoke Old English, there was a meld of the two languages which became English we’ve eventually come to speak. However, in the beginning, the conflict between the genders from the two languages with different nouns, made everyone so confused, they just decided to give up gender all together.  

 

 

o the reason English doesn’t have genders came about quite by accident. To avoid confusion, people just shaved down the language and did away with genders because the nouns didn’t match genders in each language.

 

  

     McWhorter also tackles this gendered phenomena in different languages around the world as well as shares old Broadway songs whose lyrics really stop and make him think. Overall, Lexicon Valley is an exceptional podcast especially for those in the linguistics field. 

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Works Cited:

Geleynse, Joyce. “alphabet-6916985_1280.” Pixabay, 22 Jan 2022. https://pixabay.com/illustrations/alphabet-letters-decorated-letters-6916985/. Accessed 5 Sept. 2023.

McWhorter, John, host. “Why Do Languages Have Gender?” Lexicon Valley, 19 Jan. 2021, https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley/2021/01/language-gender-noun-classes. Accessed 12 Sept. 2023.

Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke. “male-2512007_1280.” Pixabay, 22 Jul. 2022. https://pixabay.com/illustrations/male-3d-model-isolated-3d-model-2512007/. Accessed 13

Sept. 2023.