If we are talking about animate objects, like people and animals, defining a gender is easy in most cases.
But for inanimate objects, like a chair, a tree, the sky and so on, gender can be a built-in language feature or can be absent from a language.
Is grammatical gender applicable to English or is it not? I am asking whether a chair has no gender at all or is it of neutral gender?
In general, English does not have much of a gender system. We divide things into male people, female people, and everything else.
Men and boys use the masculine pronouns he, him, his. Women and girls use the feminine pronouns she, her, hers. Everything else uses the neuter pronouns it, it, its.
But there are a few odd parts to how we use English in practice. Animals are often called he or she if we know their gender and it matters to us. For example, our pets are very personal to us, so we usually call them by masculine or feminine pronouns, not neuter ones. Animals that aren't so "personal", we usually call by neuter pronouns even if we know the sex - for example, you might say, "There's a cow in my front yard. Why is it there?" even though we know that a cow is female.
Ships are traditionally called "she", but this is seen as increasingly old-fashioned. Sometimes this is extended to other objects if they seem to have a personality, mostly vehicles, but it's rare.
There are a few nouns in English that are specifically gendered - actress, waitress, editrix, chairwoman, and so forth - but we seem to be moving away from using these words in favor of neutral forms like waiter and editor. In the case of words like chairman/chairwoman, there's still an argument over whether a female person holding the office of chairman should be called chairwoman, chairman, chairperson, or just chair.
Grammatical gender is, generally speaking, absent in modern English. Like you mentioned, living things can have gender (though not all do), but inanimate objects do not.
A small exception: occasionally, when a person really, really loves an object, they will refer to it using gendered pronouns (he, she, him, her) rather than genderless pronouns (it), but this is really a case of personification. For example, when a guy really loves his car or his boat or his house, he may say things like "yeah, she'll go 125mph" or "I gave her a shine last weekend" or "she's really beautiful in the spring".
In the World Atlas of Language Structures, English is listed as having three genders, just like German and Russian.
However it is only present in third-person singular pronouns, and male or female pronouns are almost always only applied to animate creatures according to their biological or self-identified gender (namely humans and occasionally animals, especially pets), apart from rare exceptions for fetishized or anthropomorphized personal possessions, or obsolescent usages involving countries or ships.
So it might be more useful to make a clear distinction between the vestiges present in English and the full-fledged three-gender system of German or Russian.
as per WiKi Modern English is not considered to have grammatical gender now days, although Old English did have it.
What @ghostarbeiter wrote in their answer is not exactly true. I do not know about German, but Russian language have 3 gender which, just like English are identified by masculine, feminine and a third-person pronouns ON(he), ONA(she) and ONO(it).
The issue with English as opposed to some other languages, is the way to identify the gender belonging of things referenced. For example, 'a pencil' or 'a pen' - you can not identify the gender of these words by simply reading them. You need the whole sentence to determine the underlying meaning applied to the words.
By contrast, in the Russian language, most of the time, the very spelling will help you identify the gender with a few exceptions. "a pencil"=>"Karandash" is a he where "a pen"=>"Ruchka" is a she. Most feminine nouns would end on sound/suffix "a", "chka" , "va" etc., where masculine nouns would have a harder endings like "ov","or", "er" "ich". Even personal names are spelled differently using prefixes (rare) or suffixes (most common) to indicate gender.
Last names are great example here. In English a common last name 'Scott' is the same for both a man and a woman. Most last names are masculine regardless. In Russian, a common last name "Ivanov" will be spelled "Ivanov" for a man, but "Ivanova" for a woman, even if it is the same family; meaning the husband will spell "Ivanov" as his last name and the wife will use "Ivanova" as hers on any and all official documents.
Many names for things will also spell out indicating gender preferences, regardless if it is an object or a being. Example "Bulochka"(a small white bread) will be a feminine but "Hleb"(simple translation is generic bread) is obviously masculine. However coffee is commonly given a masculine definition (he) even though by all other rules it should be a third-person singular(it).
English varies a select few words only to refer to things that have natural genders, that is, genders recognized in the real world. These variations on these select few words does not change their grammatical meaning.
For example, each of the following is grammatically valid, and basically identical as far as the grammar is concerned:
Sue talked to herself.
“Sue” is a common female given name in many English-speaking countries, so some woman with that name is talking to herself.
Sue talked to himself.
Here, “Sue” is apparently the name of a male; A Boy Named Sue perhaps. English doesn’t particularly care, it just uses “himself” because the pronoun is referring to someone that is male. The meaning of the sentence is completely unchanged; even if Sue were actually a woman, this sentence would just be inaccurate, not grammatically wrong.
Sue talked to itself.
Here, “Sue” is something with neuter gender—that is, something that is sexless and (usually) inanimate. This would be very insulting, in most cases, if Sue were a human being, but if, say, Sue is the name of a robot, this sentence could be perfectly appropriate. But the rules of English grammar don’t actually care; the rules of English grammar allow for the construction of insulting sentences.
And, in fact, English grammar is perfectly willing to let you use “herself” or “himself” when discussing this robot named Sue. By choosing that name, its creators likely wanted people to think of it as more of a person than a machine and thus deserving a gendered pronoun, and maybe they’re big Johnny Cash fans so they find it amusing to refer to their robot named Sue as male.
It might not be 'officially' accepted, but I see genders in English for inanimate objects quite often. You may call it 'informal' if you are too much of linguist to accept it!
Cars are often feminine
Pets and animals are called by pronouns 'he', 'she'; Tom is 'he', but a bitch is 'she'
Countries are feminine
Our planet earth is feminine
Ships are feminine
Infrequently, nouns describing things without a gender are referred to with a gendered pronoun to show familiarity. It is also correct to use the gender-neutral pronoun (it).
The examples follow:
I love my car. She (the car) is my greatest passion.
France is popular with her (France's) neighbours at the moment.
I travelled from England to New York on the Queen Elizabeth; she (the Queen Elizabeth) is a great ship.
In my language - Swedish - we use two genders called neutral and real. Like German and Latin languages (and unlike English) our genders have a large effect on the forms all nouns take: neutral has different indefinite articles than real has, the definite forms (a Scandinavian peculiarity) work differently depending on gender and so on.
However, we also have words that correspond directly to e.g. the English actress/actor (skådespelerska/skådespelare), and we have separate personal pronouns for he/she/it.
Still I think in general we consider our language to have two genders, since neutral and real is about how articles and rules apply to all nouns. A word like "actress" isn't seen as having a female form, rather it is a separate word in its own right, with the meaning "female actor".
You can look up "actress" in a dictionary, and it will have it's own entry, right? A word form dictated by gender would rather not have its own entry, but be understood as a different form of a base word which you could find in the dictionary.
Also I think, if a language has gender, and a word has a particular form in that gender, the general rule would be that that word should always, without exception, take that form for that gender. If a person said it otherwise, people would assume that that person didn't know the language properly. I.e., if someone called Elizabeth Taylor an "actor", it would just sound weird. (maybe that's the case? I'm not a native English-speaker)
Edit: forgot to add my conclusion - I'd say English has a single gender
Simply put, no. Most languages have grammatical genders defined through articles. English however, only uses "The". For example, German has multiple gender-connected ways of saying "The", being "Der"(male), "Die"(female and multiple entities), "Das"(genderless). All of them mean "The", but they're used in front of different words. The chair, for example, would be Der stuhl. Stuhl is defined as a "male" word in German. English has no such system.
One remnant of a neutral gender in English is that monosyllabic neuter nouns don't change between single and pleural... according to an old edition of "Teach Yourself Norwegian", which presented this rule for Norwegian along with the comment that it is the same as in English. Examples: "sheep", and "fish" (although "fishes" is also used).
