Gendered Articles??

I’ve wondered for a long time why languages have gendered articles. 

Ever since my first encounter with the written Spanish language in seventh grade, I’ve not had a great answer for why a language would choose to split what could be one definite article into two (or more) articles. When I asked my Spanish teachers, they didn’t really know, and usually responded with unsatisfying or unconvincing answers. For a time, well actually until recently, either because of misinformation from my Spanish teachers or just from my own imagination, I believed that the gendering of each article that accompanies every noun had to do with that specific nouns characteristics. 

That never made too much sense though. The contrary example that always came to mind was that the Spanish word for “dress” is “el vestido” - a masculine article and noun ending for quite a feminine object. Our in class discussion this past Friday on parts of speech, which included articles and the lack thereof in some languages like Russian, prompted me to finally figure out why some languages gender their articles.

In my research, I found out that many, if not most languages actually have gendered articles. I initially thought this was strange, because I thought gendered articles were a uniquely romance language thing. * Quick disclaimer - I’m not a language expert, if you couldn’t already tell. I had forgotten that German has gendered articles, which is not a romance language. I also didn’t know that Gendered article can be found all over the world. 

Zande, a language with slightly over a million speakers in the Northern Democratic Republic of the Congo and parts of the Central African Republic and South Sudan actually has four genders for their articles. Zande divides nouns and their corresponding articles into four categories: masculine, feminine, animate, and inanimate, however some inanimate objects have animate articles due to their role in Zande mythology. 

Ok this is cool, but what does it have to do with why some languages have gendered articles? Well, to be honest, not much. I didn’t find a definitive answer why, but that’s to be expected. There’s not one person who invented each language who we can ask “Why did you decide to put gendered articles in your language?” Language develops, and has been developing well before recorded history, so we could never know for sure, but the best answer I could find was that gendered articles are a grammatical invention that allows us to categorize nouns. This would explain why many words's gender in Spanish and other languages don’t seem to match, like “el vestido.” Actually, even the Spanish word for “masculine” is feminine.

Also, final fun fact: English used to have gendered articles up until around the Middle English period.