There were many lingua francas of which French was supposedly the first global lingua franca. That changed and it became English (from what I understand). We will probably see another language become the lingua franca, so my question is: should it be English? Are there better candidates out there? Why / why not?
It’s called “grammatical gender”. The gender is of the word not what the word represents. It evolved in many different languages meaning it did so for a reason. My guess is that it started with good intentions as many things do have a sex. However, realization crept in that there are far more things on this planet without a sex (or even an identifiable one) and something had to be done. Probably it didn’t sound good either.
There are also languages where the concept of gender (not just grammatical gender, but gender itself) doesn’t exist and they have no gendered pronouns (everyone and everything is an “it” --> “the man, it moved”, “the woman, it sang”, …).
Languages are fascinating from a purely theoretical standpoint.
It even existed in Old and Middle english, upto the 1500s.
Some nouns still have genders in english. But this is more an exception than a rule. Ie. a ship/boat is female (called “she”), while nature is also feminine (often personified as “Mother nature”).