system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How English stopped being a gendered language

It seems like a majority of languages have gendered nouns, but English doesn't (at least not in a wide-spread, grammatical sense). I know that at *some point* English was gendered, but... how did it stop?

And, if possible, why did English lose its gendered nouns but other languages didn't?

**EDIT:** Wow, thank you for all the responses! I didn't expect a casual question bouncing around in my head before bed to get this type of response. But thank you so much! I'm learning so much and it's actually reviving my interest in linguistics/languages. 

Also, I had no clue there were so many languages. Thank you for calling out my western bias when it came to the assumption that most languages were gendered. While it appears a majority of indo-european ones are gendered, gendered languages are actually the minority in a grand sense. That's definitely news to me.
gpt
"Anne Curzan suggests that genders were lost because of the language mixing that went on in Northern England during that time. Between the 700s and the 1000s, there were Vikings invading northern England where peasants lived. The two groups spoke different languages: Old English and Old Norse. However, it is quite likely that many people were bilingual and fluent in both languages. Both Old English and Old Norse had gender, but sometimes their genders contradicted each other. In order to simplify communication, gendered nouns simply disappeared."