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In linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once.

If a language distinguishes between masculine and feminine gender, for instance, then each noun belongs to one of those two genders; in order to correctly decline any noun and any modifier or other type of word affecting that noun, one must identify whether the noun is feminine or masculine. The term "grammatical gender" is mostly used for Indo-European languages, many of which follow the pattern just described. While Old English (Anglo-Saxon) had grammatical gender, Modern English is normally described as lacking grammatical gender.

The linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and social notion of natural gender, although they interact closely in many languages. Both grammatical and natural gender can have linguistic effects in a given language.

Although some authors use the term "noun class" as a synonym or an extension of "grammatical gender", for others they are separate concepts. One can in fact say that grammatical gender is a type of noun class.

Overview

Many languages place each noun into one of three gender classes (or simply "genders"):
Masculine gender: includes most words that refer to males;
Feminine gender: includes most words that refer to females;
Neuter gender: includes mostly words that do not refer to males or females


For example, in their nominative singular forms Polish nouns are typically feminine if they have the ending -a, neuter when they end with -o, -e, or -ę, and masculine if they have no gender suffix (null morpheme). Thus, encyklopedia "encyclopaedia" is feminine, krzesło "chair" is neuter, and ręcznik "towel" is masculine. When the adjective duży "big" is combined with these nouns in phrases, it changes form according to their grammatical gender:

Gender Noun Phrase Meaning
Masculine ręcznik duży ręcznik big towel
Feminine encyklopedia duża encyklopedia big encyclopaedia
Neuter krzesło duże krzesło big chair


As can be seen, the neuter gender does not include all nouns that correspond to genderless realities. Some of these may be designated by nouns that are grammatically masculine or feminine. Also, some nouns that refer to males or females may have a different grammatical gender. In general, the boundaries of noun classes are rather arbitrary, although there are rules of thumb in many languages. In this context, the terms "masculine", "feminine" and "neuter" should be understood merely as convenient labels. They are suggestive class descriptors, but not every member of a class is well described by its label.

Gender marking is not substantial in modern English. However, distinctions in personal pronouns have been inherited from Old English, in which nouns had grammatical gender, giving speakers of Modern English a notion of how grammatical gender works, although these gendered pronouns are now ordinarily selected based on the physical sex (or lack thereof) of the items to which they refer rather than any strictly linguistic classification:
John insisted that he would pay for his own dinner.
Jane insisted that she would pay for her own dinner.
Here, the gender of the subject is marked both on the personal pronouns (he/she) and on the possessive adjectives (his/her). Marking of gender on the possessive form can be considered redundant in these examples, since his own and her own must refer to their respective antecedent, he and she, which are already unambiguously marked for gender.

A full system of grammatical gender involves two phenomena:
Inflection: Many words have different forms for different genders, and certain morphological markers are characteristic of each gender.
Agreement: Every noun is associated with one gender class. In a phrase or clause, words that refer to a given noun inflect to match the gender of that noun.


Note that some words, called epicene, may have identical forms for different genders. For example, in Spanish estudiante "student" and grande "big" can be masculine or feminine.

Spanish is also an example of a language with only two genders, masculine and feminine; it has no neuter noun class. Nouns that designate entities with no natural gender, such as objects or abstractions, are distributed among the masculine and the feminine. In a few other languages, notably Germanic languages like Swedish, the former masculine and feminine genders have become indistinguishable with time, merging into a new class called the common gender, which however remains distinct from the neuter gender.
Common gender: includes most words that refer to males or females, but is distinct from the neuter gender.


Other languages still, like English, are regarded as not having grammatical gender, since they do not make gender distinctions through inflection, and do not generally require gender agreement between related words.

Some authors have extended the concept of "grammatical gender" to the expression of other types of natural, individual characteristics through inflection, such as animacy. See the section on gender across languages, below.

Grammatical gender (with masculine and/or feminine categories) is commonly found in Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Indo-European, Northeast Caucasian, and several Australian aboriginal languages. It is mostly absent in the Altaic, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, and Uralic language families. The Niger-Congo languages typically have an extensive system of noun classes, which some authors regard as a type of grammatical gender, but others describe as something completely different.

Gender inflection

In many languages, gender is marked quite profusely, surfacing in different ways.
"I love you" in Arabic:
: said to a male — uħibbuka (أُحِبُّكََ)
: said to a female — uħibbuki (أُحِبُّكِ)
"Thank you very much" in Portuguese:
: said by a male — muito obrigado
: said by a female — muito obrigada


The switch from one gender to the other is typically achieved by inflecting appropriate words, the object suffix of the verb uħibbu-ka/ki in the Arabic example (gender is not marked in the first person, in Arabic), and the suffix in the past participle (or adjective) obrig-ado/a in the Portuguese example (literally this means "much obliged", with "I am" understood; thus it agrees with the gender of the speaker).

In Spanish, most masculine nouns and their modifiers end with the suffix -o or with a consonant, while the suffix -a is characteristic of feminine nouns and their modifiers (though there are many exceptions). Thus, niño means “boy”, and niña means “girl”. This paradigm can be exploited for making new words: from the masculine nouns abogado "lawyer", diputado "member of parliament" and doctor "doctor", it was straightforward to make the feminine equivalents abogada, diputada, and doctora.

Sometimes, gender is expressed in more subtle ways. On the whole, gender marking has been lost in Welsh, both on the noun, and often, on the adjective. However, it has the peculiar feature of initial mutation, where the first consonant of a word changes into another in certain syntactical conditions. Gender is one of the factors that can cause mutation, especially the so-called soft mutation. For instance, the word merch, which means girl or daughter, changes into ferch after the definite article. This only occurs with feminine nouns; for example, mab "son" remains unchanged after the definite article. Adjectives are affected by gender in a similar way.

Gender Default After definite article With adjective
Masculine mab son y mab the son y mab mawr the big son
Feminine merch girl y ferch the girl y ferch fawr the big girl


Personal names

Personal names are frequently constructed with language-specific affixes that identify the gender of the bearer. Common feminine suffixes used in English names are -a, of Latin or Romance origin (cf. Robert and Roberta) and -e, of French origin (cf. Justin and Justine). Although gender inflections may be used to construct cognate nouns for people of opposite genders in languages that have grammatical gender, this alone does not constitute grammatical gender. Distinct names for men and women are also common in languages where gender is not grammatical.

Personal pronouns

Personal pronouns often have different forms based on gender. Even though it has lost grammatical gender, English still distinguishes between "he" (generally applied to a male person), "she" (female person), and "it" (object, abstraction, or animal). But this also does not guarantee the existence of grammatical gender. There is a spoken form, "they", which although not part of the standard literary language, is cosmopolitan in the English-speaking world and is used when the gender of a person being referred to is not known (e.g. "This person doesn't know where they are going").

Gendered pronouns and their corresponding inflections vary considerably across languages. In languages that never had grammatical gender, there is normally just one word for "he" and "she", like dia in Indonesian, hän in Finnish and ő in Hungarian. These languages have different pronouns and inflections in the third person only to differentiate between people and inanimate objects (and even this distinction is commonly waived in spoken Finnish).

Dummy pronouns

In languages with only a masculine and a feminine gender, the default dummy pronoun is usually the masculine third person singular. For example, the French sentence for "It's raining" is Il pleut. There are some exceptions: the corresponding sentence in Welsh is Mae hi'n bwrw glaw, literally "She's raining". In languages with a neuter gender, the neuter gender is usually used: German: Es regnet, literally "It rains". In fact, the English word 'it' comes from the Old English neuter gender.

Gender agreement

In the French sentences Il est un grand acteur "He is a great actor" and Elle est une grande actrice "She is a great actress", almost every word changes to match the gender of the subject. The noun acteur inflects by changing the masculine suffix -eur into the feminine suffix -rice, the subject pronoun il "he" changes to elle "she", and the feminine suffix -e is added to the article (un → une) and to the adjective (grand → grande).

The following "highly contrived" Old English sentence serves as an example of gender agreement.

Old English Seo brade lind wæs tilu and ic hire lufod.
Literal translation That broad shield was good and I her loved.
Modern English That broad shield was good and I loved it.


The word hire "her" refers to lind "shield". Since this noun was grammatically feminine, the adjectives brade "broad" and tilu "good", as well as the pronouns seo "the/that" and hire "her", which referred to lind, must also appear in their feminine forms. Old English had three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, but gender inflections were greatly simplified by sound changes, and then completely lost (as well as number inflections, to a lesser extent).

In modern English, by contrast, the noun "shield" takes the neuter pronoun "it", since it designates a genderless object. In a sense, the neuter gender has grown to encompass most nouns, including many that were masculine or feminine in Old English. If one were to replace the phrase "broad shield" with "brave man" or "kind woman", the only change to the rest of the sentence would be in the pronoun at the end, which would become "him" or "her", respectively.

Grammatical vs. natural gender

The grammatical gender of a word does not always coincide with real gender of its referent. An often cited example is the German word Mädchen, which means "girl", but is treated grammatically as neuter. This is because it was constructed as the diminutive of Magd (archaic nowadays), and the diminutive suffix -chen conventionally places nouns in the "neuter" noun class. A few more examples:
  • German die Frau (feminine) and das Weib (neuter) both mean "the woman", though the latter is considered archaic.
  • Irish cailín "girl" is masculine, while stail "stallion" is feminine.
  • Slovenian dekle "girl" is neuter, while its cognate dekla "maidservant" is feminine.


Normally, such exceptions are a small minority. However, in some local dialects of German, all nouns for female persons have shifted to the neuter gender (presumably further influenced by the standard word Weib), but the feminine gender remains for some words denoting objects.

Indeterminate gender

In languages with a masculine and feminine gender (and possibly a neuter), the masculine is usually employed by default to refer to persons of unknown gender. This is still done sometimes in English, although a disputed alternative is to use the singular "they". Another alternative is to use two nouns, as in the phrase "ladies and gentlemen" (hendiadys).

In the plural, the masculine is often used to refer to a mixed group of people. Thus, in French the feminine pronoun elles always designates an all-female group of people, but the masculine pronoun ils may refer to a group of males, to a mixed group, or to a group of people of unknown genders. In English, this issue does not arise with pronouns, since there is only one plural third person pronoun, "they". However, a group of actors and actresses would still be described as a group of "actors". However, this is also because the word "actress" is falling out of use in English, while the word "actor," like "doctor," applies to thespians of both sexes.

In all these cases, one says that the feminine gender is semantically marked, while the masculine gender is unmarked.

Animals

Often, the masculine/feminine classification is only followed carefully for human beings. For animals, the relation between real and grammatical gender tends to be more arbitrary. In Spanish, for instance, a cheetah is always un guepardo (masculine) and a zebra is always una cebra (feminine), regardless of their biological sex. If it becomes necessary to specify the sex of the animal, an adjective is added, as in un guepardo hembra (a female cheetah), or una cebra macho (a male zebra). Different names for the male and the female of a species are more frequent for common pets or farm animals, eg. English horse and mare, Spanish vaca "cow" and toro "bull".

In English, it is common to refer to animals, especially house pets, for which the natural gender is known as "he" and "she", accordingly, and to animals of unknown gender as "it". Individual speakers may refer to animals of unknown sex by a gender, depending on species — for instance, some speakers may tend to refer to dogs as "he" and to cats as "she".

Objects and abstractions

Since all nouns must belong to some noun class, many end up with genders which are purely conventional. For instance, the Romance languages inherited sol "sun" (which is masculine) and luna "moon" (which is feminine) from Latin but in German and other Germanic languages Sonne "sun" is feminine and Mond "moon" is masculine. Two nouns denoting the same concept can also differ in gender in closely related languages, or within a single language. For instance, there are two different words for "car" in German: "Wagen" is masculine, whereas "Auto" is neuter. Meanwhile the word "auto" is masculine in Spanish, but it is feminine in French. In all cases, the meaning is the same.

Several words ending in -aje in Spanish are masculine: viaje (travel), paisaje (landscape), coraje (courage). But their Portuguese translations are feminine: viagem, paisagem, coragem. The Latin word via, from whom both variants (viaje and viagem) derived was feminine. Conversely, the Spanish word "nariz" (nose) is feminine, whereas the Portuguese word for "nose" is spelt identically, but it is masculine.

Also, in Polish the word księżyc "moon" is masculine, but its Russian counterpart луна is feminine. The Russian word for "sun", солнце, is neuter, while Latin word of the same archaic root sol is masculine. Also, in Russian the word собака "dog" is feminine, but its Ukrainian counterpart (with the same spelling and almost identical pronunciation) is masculine.

More examples:
Language Word Meaning Gender
Polish księżyc moon masculine
Russian луна moon feminine
Russian картофель potato masculine
Russian картошка spud feminine
Polish tramwaj tram masculine
Czech tramvaj tram feminine
Romanian tramvai tram neuter
Polish tysiąc thousand masculine
Russian тысяча thousand feminine


There is nothing inherent about the moon or a potato which makes them objectively "male" or "female". In these cases, gender is quite independent of meaning, and a property of the nouns themselves, rather than of their referents.

Sometimes the gender switches: Russian тополь (poplar) is now masculine, but less than 200 years ago (in writings of Lermontov) it was feminine. The modern loanword виски (from whisky/whiskey) was originally feminine (in a translation of Jack London stories, 1915), then masculine (in a song of Alexander Vertinsky, 1920s or 1930s), and today it has become neuter (the masculine variant is typically considered archaic, and the feminine one is completely forgotten). In Polish kometa (comet) is nowadays feminine, but less than 200 years ago (in writing of Mickiewicz) it was masculine.

Gender assignment

The gender of countries in the French language: countries with masculine names are green and countries with feminine names are purple
There are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders: according to logical or symbolic similarities in their meaning (semantic), by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphological), or through an arbitrary convention (lexical, possibly rooted in the language's history). Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent.

Semantics

In Alamblakmarker, a Sepik Hill language spoken in Papua New Guineamarker, the masculine gender includes males and things which are tall or long and slender, or narrow such as fish, crocodiles, long snakes, penises, arrows, spears and tall, slender trees, while the feminine gender includes females and things which are short, squat or wide, such as turtles, frogs, houses, fighting shields, and trees that are typically more round and squat than others. A more or less discernible correlation between noun gender and the shape of the respective object is found in some languages even in the Indo-European family.

Sometimes, semantics prevails over the formal assignment of grammatical gender (agreement in sensu). In Polish, the nouns mężczyzna "man" and książę "prince" are masculine, even though words with the ending -a are normally feminine and words that end with -ę are usually neuter. (See also Synesis). Interestingly, in Sicilian dialect the noun indicating the male sexual organ is feminine (a minchia), while the female sexual organ is masculine (u sticchiu).

Morphology

In Spanish, grammatical gender is most obviously noticeable by noun morphology. Since nouns that refer to male persons usually end in -o or a consonant and nouns that refer to female persons usually end in -a, most other nouns that end in -o or a consonant are also treated as masculine, and most nouns that end in -a are treated as feminine, whatever their meaning. (Nouns that end in some other vowel are assigned a gender either according to etymology, by analogy, or by some other convention.) Morphology may in fact override meaning, in some cases. The noun miembro "member" is always masculine, even when it refers to a woman, but persona "person" is always feminine, even when it refers to a man. It would however be far more useful to consider that the grammatical gender of almost all nouns in the Romance languages is determined by etymology, that is to say that on the whole, the gender of a word in Spanish, Italian or French is the same as the gender of its congnate word in Latin with very few exceptions.

In German also, diminutives with the endings -chen and -lein (cognates of English -kin and -ling meaning little, young) are always neuter, which is why Mädchen "girl" and Fräulein "young woman" are neuter. Another ending, the nominalizing suffix -ling, can be used to make countable nouns from uncountable nouns (Teig "dough" → Teigling "piece of dough"), or personal nouns from abstract nouns (Lehre "teaching", Strafe "punishment" → Lehrling "apprentice", Sträfling "convict") or adjectives (feige "cowardly" → Feigling "coward"), always producing masculine nouns.

In Irish, nouns ending in -óir/-eoir and -ín are always masculine; those ending -óg/-eog or -lann are always feminine.

On the other hand, the correlation between grammatical gender and morphology is usually not perfect: problema "problem" is masculine in Spanish (this is for etymological reasons, as it was derived from a Greek noun of the neuter gender), and radio "radio station" is feminine (because it is a shortening of estación de radio, a phrase whose head is the feminine noun estación).

Lexicon

In some languages, gender markers have been so eroded by time that they are no longer recognizable, even to native speakers. Most German nouns give no morphological or semantic clue as to their gender. It must simply be memorized. The conventional aspect of grammatical gender is also clear when one considers that there is nothing objective about a table which makes it feminine as French table, masculine as German Tisch, or neuter as Norwegian bord. The learner of such languages should regard gender as an integral part of each noun. A frequent recommendation is to memorize a modifier along with the noun as a unit, usually a definite article, e.g. memorizing la table — where la is the French feminine singular definite article — der Tisch – where der is the German masculine singular nominative definite article — and bordet — where the suffix -et indicates the definite neuter singular in Norwegian.

Whether a distant ancestor of French, German, Norwegian, and English had a semantic value for genders is of course a different matter. Some authors have speculated that archaic Proto-Indo-European had two noun classes with the semantic values of animate and inanimate.

Gender in English

While grammatical gender was a fully productive inflectional category in Old English, Modern English has a much less pervasive gender system, primarily based on natural gender.

There are a few traces of gender marking in Modern English:
  • Some loanwords inflect according to gender, such as actor/actress, where the suffix -or denotes the masculine, and the suffix -ress denotes the feminine.
  • The third person singular pronouns (and their possessive forms) are gender specific: "he/his" (masculine gender, overall used for males), "she/her(s)" (feminine gender, for females), "it/its" (neuter gender, mainly for objects and abstractions), "one/one's" (common gender, for anyone or anything), and "who/whose" (subordinate/vocative gender, for someone in question).


But these are insignificant features compared to a typical language with grammatical gender:
  • English has no live productive gender marker. An example is the suffix -ette (of French provenance) in rockette, from rocket, or trollette, from troll, but it is seldom used, and mostly with disparaging or humorous intent.
  • The English nouns that inflect for gender are a very small minority, typically loanwords from non-Germanic languages (the suffix -ress in the word "actress", for instance, derives from Latin -rix via French -rice). In languages with grammatical gender, there are typically thousands of words which inflect for gender.
  • The third-person singular forms of the personal pronouns are the only modifiers that inflect according to gender.


It is also noteworthy that, with few exceptions, the gender of an English pronoun coincides with the real gender of its referent, rather than with the grammatical gender of its antecedent, frequently different from the former in languages with true grammatical gender. The choice between "he", "she" and "it" invariably comes down to whether they designate a human male, a human female, or something else.

Some exceptions:
  • Animals, which can go either way, being referred to according to their sex, or as "it".
  • The pronoun "she" is sometimes used to refer to things which contain people such as countries, ships, and cars, or to refer to machines. This, however, is considered a stylistically marked, optional figure of speech. This usage is furthermore in decline and advised against by most journalistic style guides such as the Chicago Manual of Style.


Gender across language families

Indo-European

Many Indo-European languages, though not English, provide archetypical examples of grammatical gender.

Research indicates that the earliest stages of Proto-Indo-European had two genders, animate and inanimate, as did Hittite, but the animate gender (which in contrast of inanimate gender has independent accusative form) later split into masculine and feminine, originating the classical three-way classification into masculine, feminine, and neuter which most of its descendants inherited. Many Indo-European languages kept these three genders. Such is the case with most Slavic languages, classical Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, and German, for instance. Other Indo-European languages reduced the number of genders to two, either by losing the neuter (like Urdu/Hindi, most Romance languages and the Celtic languages), or by having the feminine and the masculine merge with one another into a common gender (as has happened, or is in the process of happening, to several Germanic languages). Some, like English and Afrikaans, have all but lost grammatical gender. On the other hand, a few Slavic languages have arguably added new genders to the classical three. In those ancient and modern Indo-European languages that preserve a system of noun declension (including Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Slavic, and some Germanic languages), there is a high but not absolute correlation between grammatical gender and declensional class. Many linguists also believe this to be true of the middle and late stages of Proto-Indo-European.

Exceptionally for a Romance language, Romanian has preserved the three genders of Latin, although the neuter has been reduced to a combination of the other two, in the sense that neuter nouns have masculine endings in the singular, but feminine endings in the plural. As a consequence, adjectives, pronouns, and pronominal adjectives only have two forms, both in the singular and in the plural. The same happens in Italian, to a lesser extent.

Italian third-person singular pronouns have also a "neuter" form to refer to inanimate subjects (egli and ella vs. esso and essa). In fact, even in those languages where the original three genders have been mostly lost or reduced, there is sometimes a trace of them in a few words.
English, personal pronouns: he, she, it
Spanish, definite articles (words meaning "the"): el, la, lo
Spanish, demonstratives (words meaning "this, this one"): este, esta, esto
Portuguese, indefinite pronouns (words meaning "all of him/her/it"): todo, toda, tudo
The Spanish neuter definite article lo, for example, is used with nouns that denote abstractions, eg. lo único "the only thing"; lo mismo "the same thing". In Portuguese, a distinction is made between está todo molhado "he's all wet", está toda molhada "she's all wet", and está tudo molhado "it's all wet" (used for unspecified objects). In terms of agreement, however, these "neuter" words count as masculine: both Spanish lo mismo and Portuguese tudo take masculine adjectives. English modifiers do not generally inflect with gender.

In Venetian, only the demonstratives have a neuter form referring to abstractions, so a distinction is made between varda questo "look at this thing" (neuter), varda 'sto qua "look at this one" (masculine eg. man, book, mobile) and varda 'sta qua "look at this one (feminine eg. woman, pen, hand); along the same line a distinction is made between l'è queło / queła "it's that thing/fact" (neuter), l'è qûeło là "it's that one" (masc.) and l'è qûeła là "it's that one" (fem.) where the û sound can be dropped only in the masculine and in the feminine which however take là.

See Loss of the neuter gender in Romance languages, and Gender in Dutch grammar, for further information.

Other Indo-European languages that lack grammatical gender beside English are Persian, Armenian, Bangla, Assamese, Oriya, Khowar, and Kalasha, among others.

Other types of gender classifications

Some languages have gender-like noun classifications unrelated to gender identity. Particularly common are languages with animate and inanimate categories. The term "grammatical genders" is also used by extension in this case, although many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to sexuality. Note however that the word "gender" derives from Latin genus (also the root of genre) originally meant "kind", so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning. For further information, see Animacy.

Some Slavic languages, including Russian and Czech, make grammatical distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns (in Czech only in the masculine gender; in Russian only in masculine singular, but in the plural in all genders). Another example is Polish, which can be said to distinguish five genders: personal masculine (referring to male humans), animate non-personal masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter.

masculine translation
animate inanimate
personal impersonal
Polish To jest

dobry nauczyciel.		 To jest

dobry pies.		 To jest

dobry ser.		 It's a good teacher

/ a good dog / good cheese.
Widzę

dobrego nauczyciela.		 Widzę

dobrego psa.		 Widzę

dobry ser.		 I see a good teacher

/ a good dog / good cheese.
Widzę

dobrych nauczycieli.		 Widzę

dobre psy.		 Widzę

dobre sery.		 I see good teachers

/ good dogs / good cheeses.
Slovene To je

dober učitelj / dober pes.		 To je

dober sir.		 It's a good teacher

/ a good dog / good cheese.
Vidim

dobrega učitelja / dobrega psa.		 Vidim

dober sir.		 I see a good teacher

/ a good dog / good cheese.


See Polish language: Grammar, for further information.

Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin have the same system as Slovene, but those languages are traditionally described as having a three-gender system with a separate animacy distinction.

Belarusian and Ukrainian have the same system as Russian.

Australian Aboriginal languages

The Dyirbal language is well known for its system of four noun classes, which tend to be divided along the following semantic lines:
I — animate objects, men
II — women, water, fire, violence
III — edible fruit and vegetables
IV — miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three)


The class usually labeled "feminine", for instance, includes the word for fire and nouns relating to fire, as well as all dangerous creatures and phenomena. This inspired the title of the George Lakoff book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (ISBN 0-226-46804-6).

Gurr-goni, an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in Arnhem Landmarker, has the word erriplen (English airplane) in its noun class for edible vegetables. This confusion arose through some logical analogies: firstly, the gender of 'edible vegetables' must have been extended to other plants, and hence to all kinds of wooden things. Canoes are made of wood and so, logically, they came to be included in this class as well. The class was then widened to include modes of transport more generally and so, when the borrowed word erriplen first entered the language, it was assigned to the 'edible vegetable' gender. Each analogy made perfect sense in its own local domain, but the end result however, seems ever so slightly bizarre.

The Ngangikurrunggurr language has noun classes reserved for canines, and hunting weapons, and the Anindilyakwa language has a noun class for things that reflect light. The Diyari language distinguishes only between female and other objects. Perhaps the most noun classes in any Australian language are found in Yanyuwa, which has 16 noun classes.

Caucasian languages

Some members of the Northwest Caucasian family, and almost all of the Northeast Caucasian languages, manifest noun class. In the Northeast Caucasian family, only Lezgian, Udi, and Aghul do not have noun classes. Some languages have only two classes, while the Bats language has eight. The most widespread system, however, has four classes, for male, female, animate beings and certain objects, and finally a class for the remaining nouns. The Andi language has a noun class reserved for insects.

Among Northwest Caucasian languages, Abkhaz shows a masculine-feminine-neuter distinction. Ubykh shows some inflections along the same lines, but only in some instances, and in some of these instances inflection for noun class is not even obligatory.

In all Caucasian languages that manifest class, it is not marked on the noun itself but on the dependent verbs, adjectives, pronouns and prepositions.

Niger-Congo languages

The Zande language distinguishes four noun classes:

Criterion Example Gloss
male human kumba man
female human dia wife
animate nya beast
other bambu house


There are about 80 inanimate nouns which are in the animate class, including nouns denoting heavenly objects (moon, rainbow), metal objects (hammer, ring), edible plants (sweet potato, pea), and non-metallic objects (whistle, ball). Many of the exceptions have a round shape, and some can be explained by the role they play in Zande mythology.

Basque

In Basque there are two classes, animated and inanimated; however, the only difference is in the declination of locative cases (inesive, locative genitive, adlative, terminal adlative, ablative and directional ablative). There are few words with masculine and feminine forms, generally words for relatives (cousin: lehengusu (m)/lehengusina (f)) or ancient words from Latin ("king": errege, from the Latin word regem; "queen": erregina, from reginam). In names for familiar relatives, when both genders are taking into account, either the words for each gender are put together ("son": seme; "daughter": alaba; "children"(meaning son(s) and daughter(s)): seme-alaba(k)) or there is a noun that includes both: "father": aita; "mother": ama; "father" (both genders): guraso.

Gender borrowed from one language to another

According to linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann, "morphemic adaptations of English words into American Italian or British Italian often carry the linguistic gender of the semantically-similar word in Italian itself, e.g. British Italian bagga ‘bag’(feminine), induced by Italian borsa ‘bag’ (feminine)."

Zuckermann argues that "Israeli" (his term for "Modern Hebrew") demonstrates the same phenomenon. One of the examples he provides is the Israeli word for "brush": mivréshet. He suggests that the choice of the feminine noun-template miXXéXet (each X represents a slot where a radical is inserted) was engendered by the (feminine) gender of the following words for "brush": Yiddish barsht (feminine), Polish szczotka (f), Russian shchëtka (f) (also kist’ (f) "painting brush"), German Bürste (f), French brosse (f) and Arabic mábrasha (f). Although the miXXéXet noun-template is used for instruments, there were many other possible suitable noun-templates, cf. *mavrésh and *mivrásh, both masculine.

Auxiliary and constructed languages

Many constructed languages have natural gender systems similar to that of English. Animate nouns can have distinct forms reflecting natural gender, and personal pronouns are selected according to natural gender. There is no gender agreement on modifiers. The first three languages below fall into this category.
  • Esperanto features the female suffix -in. While it differentiates a small number of male and female nouns such as patro (father) and patrino (mother), most nouns are gender-neutral and the use of it is not necessary. For instance, hundo means either a male or female dog, virhundo means a male dog, and hundino means a female dog. The personal pronouns li (he) and ŝi (she) and their possessive forms lia (his) and ŝia (her) are used for male and female antecedents, while ĝi (it) and its possessive form ĝia (its) are used to refer to a non-personal antecedent, or as an epicene pronoun.
  • Ido has the masculine infix -ul and the feminine infix -in for animate beings. Both are optional and are used only if it is necessary to avoid ambiguity. Thus: kato "a cat", katulo "a male cat", katino "a female cat". There are third person singular and plural pronouns for all three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter, but also gender-free pronouns.
  • Interlingua has no grammatical gender. It indicates only natural gender, as in matre "mother" and patre "father". Interlingua speakers may use feminine endings. For example, -a may be used in place of -o in catto, producing catta "female cat". Professora may be used to denote a professor who is female, and actrice may be used to mean "actress". As in Ido, inflections marking gender are optional, although some gender-specific nouns such as femina, "woman", happen to end in -a or -o. Interlingua has feminine pronouns, and its general pronoun forms are also used as masculine pronouns.
  • The fictional Klingon language has three classes: capable of speaking, body part and other.


See also Gender-neutrality in languages with grammatical gender: International auxiliary languages, and Gender-specific pronoun: Constructed languages.

Male and female speech

Some natural languages have intricate systems of gender-specific vocabulary, which are not the same as grammatical gender.
  • The oldest recorded language is Sumerian. The Sumerians lived in what is now southern Iraq about 5,000 years ago. Sumerian women had a special language called Emesal, distinct from the main language, Emegir, which was spoken by both genders. The women's language had a distinct vocabulary, found in the records of religious rituals to be performed by women, also in the speech of goddesses in mythological texts.
  • For a significant period of time in the history of the ancient languages of India, after the formal language Sanskrit diverged from the popular Prakrit languages, some Sanskrit plays recorded the speech of women in Prakrit, distinct from the Sanskrit of male speakers. This convention was also used for illiterate and low-caste male speakers.
  • More recently, Thai shows evidence of similar features, where women have vocabulary items used in common speech, but typically distinct ones to be used among themselves.
  • Garifuna has a vocabulary split between terms used only by men and terms used only by women. This does not however affect the entire vocabulary but when it does, the terms used by men generally come from Carib and those used by women come from Arawak.
  • The indigenous Australian language Yanyuwa has separate dialects for men and women.
  • In Japanese also, certain synonyms are used by men and women with different frequency, or conveying different connotations. However, there is no systematic inflectional relation between male and female words, nor any form of agreement, and their literal meaning does not change with gender. See Gender differences in spoken Japanese for further information.


List of languages by type of grammatical genders

Masculine and feminine



Common and neuter

(note that the common/neuter distinction is close to animate/inanimate)
  • Danish
  • Dutch The masculine and the feminine have merged into a common gender in standard Dutch, but a distinction is still made by many when using pronouns, and in some dialects: see gender in Dutch grammar.
  • Low German
  • Norwegian (In the dialect of Bergenmarker; also in the conservative Riksmål)
  • Swedish The distinction between masculine and feminine still exists for persons and some animals. Some dialects retain all three genders for all nouns.


Animate and inanimate



In many such languages, what is commonly termed "animacy" may in fact be more accurately described as a distinction between human and non-human, rational and irrational, "socially active" and "socially passive" etc..

Masculine, feminine, and neuter



Note. In Slavic languages marked with an asterisk (*), traditionally only masculine, feminine and neuter genders are recognized, with animacy as a separate category for the masculine; the actual situation is similar to Czech and other Slavic languages, so they may be analyzed as four-gender languages as well.

More than three grammatical genders

  • Czech and Slovak: Masculine animate, Masculine inanimate, Feminine, Neuter (traditionally, only masculine, feminine and neuter genders are recognized, with animacy as a separate category for the masculine).
  • Polish: Masculine animate, Masculine inanimate, Masculine personal, Feminine, Neuter (traditionally, only masculine, feminine and neuter genders are recognized, with animacy as a separate category for the masculine).
  • Dyirbal: Masculine, feminine, vegetal and other. (Some linguists do not regard the noun class system of this language as grammatical gender.)
  • Luganda: ten classes called simply Class I to Class X and containing all sorts of arbitrary groupings but often characterised as people, long objects, animals, miscellaneous objects, large objects and liquids, small objects, languages, pejoratives, infinitives, mass nouns
  • Zande: Masculine, feminine, animate, and inanimate.


No grammatical genders

See Noun class: languages without noun classes or grammatical genders.

See also

Further examples of the presence and absence of grammatical gender



Related topics



Similar linguistic notions



Gender-inclusive language



Organizations

  • IGALA (International Gender and Language Group)


Notes

Bibliography

  • Craig, Colette G. (1986). Noun classes and categorization: Proceedings of a symposium on categorization and noun classification, Eugene, Oregon, October 1983. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins.
  • Corbett, Greville G. (1991) Gender, Cambridge University Press —A comprehensive study; looks at 200 languages.
  • Corbett, Geville (1994) "Gender and gender systems". En R. Asher (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp. 1347 – 1353.
  • Greenberg, J. H. (1978) "How does a language acquire gender markers?". En J. H. Greenberg et al. (eds.) Universals of Human Language, Vol. 4, pp. 47 – 82.
  • Hockett, Charles F. (1958) A Course in Modern Linguistics, Macmillan.
  • Ibrahim, M. (1973) Grammatical gender. Its origin and development. La Haya: Mouton.
  • Iturrioz, J. L. (1986) "Structure, meaning and function: a functional analysis of gender and other classificatory techniques". Función 1. 1–3.
  • Pinker, Steven (1994) The Language Instinct, William Morrow and Company.


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