ABSTRACT
Old English was an inflectional language. But towards the end of the Old English period, inflections had begun to die out. As Merja Steenroos explains in this reading, the loss of inflections for grammatical gender is one marker of the difference between Old and Middle English. But gender change didn’t occur at the same rate in all varieties of Old English. In the Southwest Midlands, for instance, gender survived into Middle English, during which period it then gradually declined. This reading is an abridged version of a journal article by Steenroos that explores precisely how changes in grammatical gender occurred in the Southwest Midlands during the thirteenth century. It demonstrates how historical linguists go about studying such grammatical changes systematically. Old English retained the three Indo-European genders, viz. masculine, feminine and neuter. Like most languages with gender, Old English combined semantically and formally based gender assignment rules.
