@David I also have deep interest in language but was definitely not as familiar with Sapir-Whorf as you are – but then you are a teacher. 😅

I'm born in Liberia, lived in Saudi Arabia and Tanzania… studied Arabic and French in school by way of English (nothing that stuck very well unfortunately), but supposedly my mother tongue is Swedish 😁.

I started speaking English and Swedish essentially at the same time according to my mother, and waited until I was almost 3 years old to do so…

My kids tend to speak better English than Swedish without necessarily being bilingual in the traditional sense… their influence from online friends is just that big…

To be clear, when I mentioned gender before it was not gendered nouns I was thinking about but rather pronouns.