Is the English Language becoming more generic, in the sense that English is distinguishing less between masculine and feminine?

Question

To clarify: what I mean is that in Australia for instance there is a trend in English to use words that do not distinguish between men and women. E.g. Chairperson instead of Chairman.

So the question relates to whether or not English is (both in terms of the adoption of new words and the adoption of words into common usage) moving away from distinguishing between masculine and feminine gender terms.

Answer 1

I doubt that this move towards gender-neutral terms for professions is enough to risk the loss of gender from English completely. We still retain it in our pronouns (he, she, it), and while there is a trend towards using "they" as the neutral 3rd-person singular, the gendered pronouns seem to be going strong. We still have kinship terms like mother, father, uncle, aunt, etc. that are gendered, and that show no signs of being replaced. So, I think we have a long way to go still before there would be a real likelihood of English becoming genderless.

Is it possible in theory for English (or any language) to lose all grammatical gender over time? Yes. Grammatical gender is not present in a majority of the world's languages. Also, English used to have fully grammatical gender for masculine, feminine, and neuter, like German, and what we have today is all that remains. So these things can certainly come and go.

We won't see it in our lifetimes, in any case.

Answer 2

masculine and feminine tenses

Masculine versus feminine versus neuter are genders, not tenses. Past, present, past prefect, etc, are tenses.

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Just because English uses the neuter gender, while several latin-based languages assign genders, has nothing really to do with how "general" an idea that can be expressed in the language is. The word for "map" in Spanish ("Él mapa" -- interesting word because it's masculine yet still ends in "a" -- tripped me up quite a bit in my Spanish classes) is masculine. That doesn't mean that there's anything inherently "male" conveyed about the map, just that the word map is masculine. It's just something you have to remember about the word.

English is similar, but more so for it's pronunciation. You can always pronounce a Spanish word because the language itself is phonetic. However, in English there are a few general patterns, but there are plenty of oddballs with respect to pronunciation -- "pterodactyl" anyone?

EDIT: The short and sweet answer to your question is: no, English is not "more general".