If we are talking about animate objects, like people and animals, defining a gender is easy in most cases.
But for inanimate objects, like a chair, a tree, the sky and so on, gender can be a built-in language feature or can be absent from a language.
Is grammatical gender applicable to English or is it not? I am asking whether a chair has no gender at all or is it of neutral gender?
Best Answer
In general, English does not have much of a gender system. We divide things into male people, female people, and everything else.
Men and boys use the masculine pronouns he, him, his. Women and girls use the feminine pronouns she, her, hers. Everything else uses the neuter pronouns it, it, its.
But there are a few odd parts to how we use English in practice. Animals are often called he or she if we know their gender and it matters to us. For example, our pets are very personal to us, so we usually call them by masculine or feminine pronouns, not neuter ones. Animals that aren't so "personal", we usually call by neuter pronouns even if we know the sex - for example, you might say, "There's a cow in my front yard. Why is it there?" even though we know that a cow is female.
Ships are traditionally called "she", but this is seen as increasingly old-fashioned. Sometimes this is extended to other objects if they seem to have a personality, mostly vehicles, but it's rare.
There are a few nouns in English that are specifically gendered - actress, waitress, editrix, chairwoman, and so forth - but we seem to be moving away from using these words in favor of neutral forms like waiter and editor. In the case of words like chairman/chairwoman, there's still an argument over whether a female person holding the office of chairman should be called chairwoman, chairman, chairperson, or just chair.