<P> By the 11th century, the role of grammatical gender in Old English was beginning to decline . The Middle English of the 13th century was in transition to the loss of a gender system . One element of this process was the change in the functions of the words the and that (then spelt þe and þat; see also Old English determiners): previously these had been non-neuter and neuter forms respectively of a single determiner, but in this period the came to be used generally as a definite article and that as a demonstrative; both thus ceased to manifest any gender differentiation . The loss of gender classes was part of a general decay of inflectional endings and declensional classes by the end of the 14th century . While inflectional reduction seems to have been incipient in the English language itself, some theories suggest that it was accelerated by contact with Old Norse, especially in midland and northern dialects . </P> <P> Gender loss began in the north of England; the south - east and the south - west Midlands were the most linguistically conservative regions, and Kent retained traces of gender in the 1340s . Late 14th - century London English had almost completed the shift away from grammatical gender, and Modern English retains no morphological agreement of words with grammatical gender . </P> <P> Gender is no longer an inflectional category in Modern English . The only traces of the Old English gender system are found in the system of pronoun--antecedent agreement, although this is now based on natural gender--the sex, gender identity, or perceived sexual characteristics, of the pronoun's referent . Another manifestation of natural gender that continues to function in English is the use of certain nouns to refer specifically to persons or animals of a particular sex: widow / widower, actor / actress, etc . </P> <P> Benjamin Whorf described grammatical gender in English as a covert grammatical category . He noted that gender as a property inherent in nouns (rather than in their referents) is not entirely absent from modern English: different pronouns may be appropriate for the same referent depending on what noun has been used . </P>

How many genders are there in english grammar
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