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In
linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
, grammatical gender system is a specific form of
noun class In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...
system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the
grammatical category In linguistics, a grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values (sometimes called grammemes), which are normally mutually exclusive ...
called ''gender''; the values present in a given language (of which there are usually two or three) are called the ''genders'' of that language. Whereas some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", others use different definitions for each; many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to sex. Gender systems are used in approximately one half of the world's
language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
s. According to one definition: "Genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behaviour of associated words."


Overview

Languages with grammatical gender usually have two to four different genders, but some are attested with up to 20. Common gender divisions include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine, and neuter; or
animate Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most anima ...
and inanimate. Depending on the language and the word, this assignment might bear some relationship with the meaning of the noun (e.g. "woman" is usually feminine), or may be arbitrary. In a few languages, the gender assignment of nouns is solely determined by their meaning or attributes, like biological sex, humanness, or animacy. However, the existence of words that denote male and female, such as the difference between "aunt" and "uncle" is not enough to constitute a gender system. In other languages, the division into genders usually correlates to some degree, at least for a certain set of nouns (such as those denoting humans), with some property or properties of the things that particular nouns denote. Such properties include
animacy Animacy (antonym: inanimacy) is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. Widely expressed, animacy is one of the most elementary principles in languages around th ...
or inanimacy, "
human Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...
ness" or non-humanness, and biological
sex Sex is the trait that determines whether a sexually reproducing animal or plant produces male or female gametes. Male plants and animals produce smaller mobile gametes (spermatozoa, sperm, pollen), while females produce larger ones ( ova, of ...
. However, in most languages, this
semantic Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...
division is only partially valid, and many nouns may belong to a gender category that contrasts with their meaning (e.g. the word for "manliness" could be of feminine gender, as it is in French with "masculinité" and "virilité"). In such a case, the gender assignment can also be influenced by the
morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines * Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts * Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...
or
phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
of the noun, or in some cases can be apparently arbitrary. Usually each noun is assigned to one of the genders, and few or no nouns can occur in more than one gender. Gender is considered an inherent quality of nouns, and it affects the forms of other related words, a process called "agreement". Nouns may be considered the "triggers" of the process, whereas other words will be the "target" of these changes. These related words can be, depending on the language:
determiner A determiner, also called determinative (abbreviated ), is a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and generally serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context. That is, a determiner m ...
s,
pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not co ...
s, numerals, quantifiers,
possessive A possessive or ktetic form (abbreviated or ; from la, possessivus; grc, κτητικός, translit=ktētikós) is a word or grammatical construction used to indicate a relationship of possession in a broad sense. This can include strict owne ...
s,
adjective In linguistics, an adjective (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that generally grammatical modifier, modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Tra ...
s, past and passive
participle In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from ...
s,
article Article often refers to: * Article (grammar), a grammatical element used to indicate definiteness or indefiniteness * Article (publishing), a piece of nonfictional prose that is an independent part of a publication Article may also refer to: G ...
s,
verb A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...
s,
adverbs An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering que ...
,
complementizer In linguistics (especially generative grammar), complementizer or complementiser (glossing abbreviation: ) is a functional category (part of speech) that includes those words that can be used to turn a clause into the subject or object of a s ...
s, and
adposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
s. Gender class may be marked on the noun itself, but will also always be marked on other constituents in a noun phrase or sentence. If the noun is explicitly marked, both trigger and target may feature similar alternations.


Functions of grammatical gender

Three possible functions of grammatical gender include: # In a language with explicit inflections for gender, it is easy to express gender distinctions in animate beings. # Grammatical gender "can be a valuable tool of disambiguation", rendering clarity about antecedents or
homophone A homophone () is a word that is pronounced the same (to varying extent) as another word but differs in meaning. A ''homophone'' may also differ in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example ''rose'' (flower) and ''rose'' (p ...
s. # In literature, gender can be used to "animate and personify inanimate nouns". Among these, role 2 is probably the most important in everyday usage. Languages with gender distinction generally have fewer cases of ambiguity concerning, for example, pronominal reference. In the English phrase "''a flowerbed in the garden which I maintain''", only context tells us whether the relative clause (''which I maintain'') refers to the whole garden or just the flowerbed. In German, gender distinction prevents such ambiguity. The word for "flowerbed" () is neuter, whereas that for "garden" () is masculine. Hence, if a neuter relative pronoun is used, the relative clause refers to "flowerbed", and if a masculine pronoun is used, the relative clause refers to "garden". Because of this, languages with gender distinction can often use pronouns where in English a noun would have to be repeated in order to avoid confusion. It does not, however, help in cases where the words are of the same grammatical gender. Then again, there are often several synonymous nouns of different grammatical gender to pick from to avoid this. Moreover, grammatical gender may serve to distinguish homophones. It is a quite common phenomenon in language development for two
phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
s to merge, thereby making etymologically distinct words sound alike. In languages with gender distinction, however, these word pairs may still be distinguishable by their gender. For example, French ("pot") and ("skin") are homophones , but disagree in gender: vs. .


Gender contrasts

Common systems of gender contrast include: * masculine–feminine gender contrast * masculine–feminine–neuter gender contrast * animate–inanimate gender contrast * common–neuter gender contrast


Masculine–feminine contrast

Nouns that denote specifically male persons (or animals) are normally of masculine gender; those that denote specifically female persons (or animals) are normally of feminine gender; and nouns that denote something that does not have any sex, or do not specify the sex of their referent, have come to belong to one or other of the genders, in a way that may appear arbitrary. Examples of languages with such a system include most of the modern
Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language fam ...
, the
Baltic languages The Baltic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 4.5 million people mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. Together with the Slavic lang ...
, the
Celtic languages The Celtic languages ( usually , but sometimes ) are a group of related languages descended from Proto-Celtic. They form a branch of the Indo-European language family. The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward ...
, some
Indo-Aryan languages The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily ...
(e.g.,
Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...
), and the
Afroasiatic languages The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic su ...
.


Masculine–feminine–neuter contrast

This is similar to systems with a masculine–feminine contrast, except that there is a third available gender, so nouns with sexless or unspecified-sex referents may be either masculine, feminine, or neuter. There are also certain exceptional nouns whose gender does not follow the denoted sex, such as the German , meaning "girl", which is neuter. This is because it is actually a diminutive of "Magd" and all diminutive forms with the suffix are neuter. Examples of languages with such a system include later forms of
Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-E ...
(see
below Below may refer to: *Earth *Ground (disambiguation) *Soil *Floor *Bottom (disambiguation) Bottom may refer to: Anatomy and sex * Bottom (BDSM), the partner in a BDSM who takes the passive, receiving, or obedient role, to that of the top or ...
),
Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
, some
Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, Engli ...
, most
Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Ear ...
, a few
Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language fam ...
(
Romanian Romanian may refer to: *anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania **Romanians, an ethnic group **Romanian language, a Romance language ***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language **Romanian cuisine, traditional ...
, Asturian and
Neapolitan Neapolitan means of or pertaining to Naples, a city in Italy; or to: Geography and history * Province of Naples, a province in the Campania region of southern Italy that includes the city * Duchy of Naples, in existence during the Early and Hig ...
),
Marathi Marathi may refer to: *Marathi people, an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group of Maharashtra, India *Marathi language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people *Palaiosouda, also known as Marathi, a small island in Greece See also * * ...
,
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
, and
Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
.


Animate–inanimate contrast

Here nouns that denote
animate Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most anima ...
things (humans and animals) generally belong to one gender, and those that denote inanimate things to another (although there may be some deviation from that principle). Examples include earlier forms of Proto-Indo-European and the earliest family known to have split off from it, the extinct
Anatolian languages The Anatolian languages are an extinct branch of Indo-European languages that were spoken in Anatolia, part of present-day Turkey. The best known Anatolian language is Hittite, which is considered the earliest-attested Indo-European language. ...
(see
below Below may refer to: *Earth *Ground (disambiguation) *Soil *Floor *Bottom (disambiguation) Bottom may refer to: Anatomy and sex * Bottom (BDSM), the partner in a BDSM who takes the passive, receiving, or obedient role, to that of the top or ...
). Modern examples include
Algonquian languages The Algonquian languages ( or ; also Algonkian) are a subfamily of Indigenous languages of the Americas, indigenous American languages that include most languages in the Algic languages, Algic language family. The name of the Algonquian language f ...
such as
Ojibwe The Ojibwe, Ojibwa, Chippewa, or Saulteaux are an Anishinaabe people in what is currently southern Canada, the northern Midwestern United States, and Northern Plains. According to the U.S. census, in the United States Ojibwe people are one of ...
. * In Northern
Kurdish language Kurdish (, ) is a language or a group of languages spoken by Kurds in the geo-cultural region of Kurdistan and the Kurdish diaspora. Kurdish constitutes a dialect continuum, belonging to Western Iranian languages in the Indo-European language ...
(
Kurmanji Kurmanji ( ku, کورمانجی, lit=Kurdish, translit=Kurmancî, also termed Northern Kurdish, is the northern dialect of the Kurdish languages, spoken predominantly in southeast Turkey, northwest and northeast Iran, northern Iraq, northern Sy ...
), the same word can have two genders according to the context. For example, if the word (meaning 'wood' or 'tree') is feminine, it means that it is a living tree (e.g., means 'apple tree'), but if it is masculine, it means that it is dead, no longer living (e.g., means 'apple wood'). So if one wants to refer to a certain table that is made of wood from an apple tree, one cannot use the word with a feminine gender, and if one wants to refer to an apple tree in a garden, one cannot use with a masculine gender.


Common–neuter contrast

Here a masculine–feminine–neuter system previously existed, but the distinction between masculine and feminine genders has been lost in nouns (they have merged into what is called ''common gender''), though not in pronouns that can operate under natural gender. Thus nouns denoting people are usually of common gender, whereas other nouns may be of either gender. Examples include
Danish Danish may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the country of Denmark People * A national or citizen of Denmark, also called a "Dane," see Demographics of Denmark * Culture of Denmark * Danish people or Danes, people with a Danish a ...
and
Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
(see
Gender in Danish and Swedish In standard Danish and Swedish, nouns have two grammatical genders, and pronouns have the same two grammatical genders in addition to two natural genders similar to English. Overview Historically, nouns in standard Danish and Swedish, like ...
), and to some extent Dutch (see
Gender in Dutch grammar In the Dutch language, the gender of a noun determines the articles, adjective forms and pronouns that are used in reference to that noun. Gender is a complicated topic in Dutch, because depending on the geographical area or each individual spea ...
). The dialect of the old Norwegian capital
Bergen Bergen (), historically Bjørgvin, is a city and municipality in Vestland county on the west coast of Norway. , its population is roughly 285,900. Bergen is the second-largest city in Norway. The municipality covers and is on the peninsula of ...
also uses common gender and neuter exclusively. The common gender in Bergen and in Danish is inflected with the same articles and suffixes as the masculine gender in
Norwegian Bokmål Norwegian, Norwayan, or Norsk may refer to: *Something of, from, or related to Norway, a country in northwestern Europe *Norwegians, both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway *Demographics of Norway *The Norwegian language, including the ...
. This makes some obviously feminine noun phrases like "a cute girl", "the well milking cow" or "the pregnant mares" sound strange to most Norwegian ears when spoken by Danes and people from Bergen since they are inflected in a way that sounds like the masculine declensions in South-Eastern Norwegian dialects. The same does not apply to
Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
common gender, as the declensions follow a different pattern from both the Norwegian written languages.
Norwegian Nynorsk Nynorsk () () is one of the two written standards of the Norwegian language, the other being Bokmål. From 12 May 1885, it became the state-sanctioned version of Ivar Aasen's standard Norwegian language ( no, Landsmål) parallel to the Dano-Nor ...
,
Norwegian Bokmål Norwegian, Norwayan, or Norsk may refer to: *Something of, from, or related to Norway, a country in northwestern Europe *Norwegians, both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway *Demographics of Norway *The Norwegian language, including the ...
and most spoken dialects retain masculine, feminine and neuter even if their Scandinavian neighbours have lost one of the genders. As shown, the merger of masculine and feminine in these languages and dialects can be considered a reversal of the original split in Proto-Indo-European (see
below Below may refer to: *Earth *Ground (disambiguation) *Soil *Floor *Bottom (disambiguation) Bottom may refer to: Anatomy and sex * Bottom (BDSM), the partner in a BDSM who takes the passive, receiving, or obedient role, to that of the top or ...
).


Other types of division or subdivision of gender

Some gender contrasts are referred to as ''classes''; for some examples, see
Noun class In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...
. In some of the
Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Ear ...
, for example, within the masculine and sometimes feminine and neuter genders, there is a further division between animate and inanimate nouns—and in
Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent * Polish chicken *Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...
, also sometimes between nouns denoting humans and non-humans. (For details, see
below Below may refer to: *Earth *Ground (disambiguation) *Soil *Floor *Bottom (disambiguation) Bottom may refer to: Anatomy and sex * Bottom (BDSM), the partner in a BDSM who takes the passive, receiving, or obedient role, to that of the top or ...
.) A human–non-human (or "rational–non-rational") distinction is also found in
Dravidian languages The Dravidian languages (or sometimes Dravidic) are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan. Since the colonial era, there have been small but significant ...
. (See
below Below may refer to: *Earth *Ground (disambiguation) *Soil *Floor *Bottom (disambiguation) Bottom may refer to: Anatomy and sex * Bottom (BDSM), the partner in a BDSM who takes the passive, receiving, or obedient role, to that of the top or ...
.)


How gender contrasts can influence cognition

Grammatical gender does not appear to constrain thought. However, they do slightly impact the way we think: for instance, it has been consistently shown that gender causes a number of cognitive effects. For example, when native speakers of gendered languages are asked to imagine an inanimate object speaking, whether its voice is male or female tends to correspond to the grammatical gender of the object in their language. This has been observed for speakers of Spanish, French, and German, among others. Caveats of this research include the possibility of subjects' "using grammatical gender as a strategy for performing the task", and the fact that even for inanimate objects the gender of nouns is not always random. For example, in Spanish, female gender is often attributed to objects that are "used by women, natural, round, or light" and male gender to objects "used by men, artificial, angular, or heavy." Apparent failures to reproduce the effect for German speakers has also led to a proposal that the effect is restricted to languages with a two-gender system, possibly because such languages are inclined towards a greater correspondence between grammatical and natural gender. Another kind of test asks people to describe a noun, and attempts to measure whether it takes on gender-specific connotations depending on the speaker's native language. For example, one study found that German speakers describing a bridge (german: Brücke, ) more often used the words 'beautiful', 'elegant', 'pretty', and 'slender', while Spanish speakers, whose word for bridge is masculine (, ), used 'big', 'dangerous', 'strong', and 'sturdy' more often. However, studies of this kind have been criticised on various grounds and yield an unclear pattern of results overall.


Related linguistic concepts


Noun classes

A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its
referent A referent () is a person or thing to which a name – a linguistic expression or other symbol – refers. For example, in the sentence ''Mary saw me'', the referent of the word ''Mary'' is the particular person called Mary who is being spoken of, ...
, such as sex, animacy, shape, although in some instances a noun can be placed in a particular class based purely on its grammatical behavior. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others use different definitions for each. Many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to sex, such as when an
animate Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most anima ...
–inanimate distinction is made. Note, however, that the word "gender" derives from Latin (also the root of ''genre'') which originally meant "kind", so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning.


Noun classifiers

A classifier, or
measure word In linguistics, measure words are words (or morphemes) that are used in combination with a numeral to indicate an amount of something represented by some noun. Description Measure words denote a unit or measurement and are used with mass nouns ...
, is a
word A word is a basic element of language that carries an semantics, objective or pragmatics, practical semantics, meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of w ...
or
morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...
used in some languages together with a noun, principally to enable numbers and certain other
determiner A determiner, also called determinative (abbreviated ), is a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and generally serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context. That is, a determiner m ...
s to be applied to the noun. They are not regularly used in English or other European languages, although they parallel the use of words such as ''piece(s)'' and ''head'' in phrases like "three pieces of paper" or "thirty head of cattle". They are a prominent feature of
East Asian languages The East Asian languages are a language family (alternatively ''macrofamily'' or ''superphylum'') proposed by Stanley Starosta in 2001. The proposal has since been adopted by George van Driem. Classifications Early proposals Early proposals of s ...
, where it is common for all nouns to require a classifier when being quantified—for example, the equivalent of "three people" is often "three ''classifier'' people". A more general type of classifier (
classifier handshape In sign languages, the term classifier construction (also known as classifier predicates) refers to a morphological system that can express events and states. They use handshape classifiers to represent movement, location, and shape. Classifier ...
s) can be found in
sign language Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign l ...
s. Classifiers can be considered similar to genders or noun classes, in that a language which uses classifiers normally has a number of different ones, used with different sets of nouns. These sets depend largely on properties of the things that the nouns denote (for example, a particular classifier may be used for long thin objects, another for flat objects, another for people, another for abstracts, etc.), although sometimes a noun is associated with a particular classifier more by convention than for any obvious reason. However it is also possible for a given noun to be usable with any of several classifiers; for example, the
Mandarin Mandarin or The Mandarin may refer to: Language * Mandarin Chinese, branch of Chinese originally spoken in northern parts of the country ** Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, the official language of China ** Taiwanese Mandarin, Stand ...
Chinese classifier The modern varieties of Chinese, Chinese varieties make frequent use of what are called classifier (linguistics), classifiers or measure words. One use of classifiers is when a noun is qualified by a numeral (linguistics), numeral known as a noun ...
() is frequently used as an alternative to various more specific classifiers.


The manifestation of grammatical gender

Grammatical gender can be realized as inflection and can be conditioned by other types of inflection, especially number inflection, where the singular-plural contrast can interact with gender inflection.


Grammatical gender can be realized as inflection

The grammatical gender of a noun manifests itself in two principal ways: in the modifications that the noun itself undergoes, and in modifications of other related words (
agreement Agreement may refer to: Agreements between people and organizations * Gentlemen's agreement, not enforceable by law * Trade agreement, between countries * Consensus, a decision-making process * Contract, enforceable in a court of law ** Meeting o ...
).


Grammatical gender as noun inflection

Grammatical gender manifests itself when words related to a noun like
determiner A determiner, also called determinative (abbreviated ), is a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and generally serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context. That is, a determiner m ...
s,
pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not co ...
s or
adjective In linguistics, an adjective (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that generally grammatical modifier, modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Tra ...
s change their form (''
inflect In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and def ...
'') according to the gender of noun they refer to (''agreement''). The
parts of speech In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are ass ...
affected by gender agreement, the circumstances in which it occurs, and the way words are marked for gender vary between languages. Gender inflection may interact with other grammatical categories like
number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers c ...
or case. In some languages the
declension In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and ar ...
pattern followed by the noun itself will be different for different genders. The gender of a noun may affect the modifications that the noun itself undergoes, particularly the way in which the noun inflects for
number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers c ...
and case. For example, a language like
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
,
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...
or
Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
has a number of different declension patterns, and which pattern a particular noun follows may be highly correlated with its gender. For some instances of this, see
Latin declension Latin declension is the set of patterns according to which Latin words are declined—that is, have their endings altered to show grammatical case, number and gender. Nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are declined (verbs are conjugated), and a gi ...
. A concrete example is provided by the German word , which has two possible genders: when it is masculine (meaning "lake") its
genitive In grammar, the genitive case (abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can al ...
singular form is , but when it is feminine (meaning "sea"), the genitive is , because feminine nouns do not take the genitive ''-s''. Gender is sometimes reflected in other ways. In
Welsh Welsh may refer to: Related to Wales * Welsh, referring or related to Wales * Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales * Welsh people People * Welsh (surname) * Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peop ...
, gender marking is mostly lost on nouns; however, Welsh has
initial mutation Consonant mutation is change in a consonant in a word according to its morphological or syntactic environment. Mutation occurs in languages around the world. A prototypical example of consonant mutation is the initial consonant mutation of all ...
, where the first consonant of a word changes into another in certain conditions. Gender is one of the factors that can cause one form of mutation (soft mutation). For instance, the word "girl" changes into ''ferch'' after the
definite article An article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech. In English, both "the" and "a(n)" ar ...
. This only occurs with feminine singular nouns: "son" remains unchanged. Adjectives are affected by gender in a similar way. Additionally, in many languages, gender is often closely correlated with the basic unmodified form ( lemma) of the noun, and sometimes a noun can be modified to produce (for example) masculine and feminine words of similar meaning. See , below.


Grammatical gender as agreement or concord

Agreement Agreement may refer to: Agreements between people and organizations * Gentlemen's agreement, not enforceable by law * Trade agreement, between countries * Consensus, a decision-making process * Contract, enforceable in a court of law ** Meeting o ...
, or concord, is a grammatical process in which certain words change their form so that values of certain
grammatical categories In linguistics, a grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values (sometimes called grammemes), which are normally mutually exclusiv ...
match those of related words. Gender is one of the categories which frequently require agreement. In this case, nouns may be considered the "triggers" of the process, because they have an inherent gender, whereas related words that change their form to match the gender of the noun can be considered the "target" of these changes. These related words can be, depending on the language:
determiner A determiner, also called determinative (abbreviated ), is a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and generally serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context. That is, a determiner m ...
s,
pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not co ...
s, numerals, quantifiers,
possessive A possessive or ktetic form (abbreviated or ; from la, possessivus; grc, κτητικός, translit=ktētikós) is a word or grammatical construction used to indicate a relationship of possession in a broad sense. This can include strict owne ...
s,
adjective In linguistics, an adjective (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that generally grammatical modifier, modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Tra ...
s, past and passive
participle In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from ...
s,
verb A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...
s,
adverbs An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering que ...
,
complementizer In linguistics (especially generative grammar), complementizer or complementiser (glossing abbreviation: ) is a functional category (part of speech) that includes those words that can be used to turn a clause into the subject or object of a s ...
s, and
adposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
s. Gender class may be marked on the noun itself, but can also be marked on other constituents in a noun phrase or sentence. If the noun is explicitly marked, both trigger and target may feature similar alternations. As an example, we consider
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Cana ...
, a language with two gender categories: "natural" vs "grammatical". "Natural" gender can be masculine or feminine, while "grammatical" gender can be masculine, feminine, or neuter. This third, or "neuter" gender is reserved for abstract concepts derived from adjectives: such as , ("that which is good/bad"). Natural gender refers to the biological sex of most animals and people, while grammatical gender refers to certain phonetic characteristics (the sounds at the end, or beginning) of a noun. Among other lexical items, the
definite article An article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech. In English, both "the" and "a(n)" ar ...
changes its form according to this categorization. In the singular, the article is: (masculine), and (feminine). Thus, in "natural gender", nouns referring to sexed beings who are male beings carry the masculine article, and female beings the feminine article (agreement). In "grammatical" gender, most words that end in , and are marked with "feminine" articles, while all others use the "generic" or "masculine" articles.


Gender inflection and number inflection

In some languages the gender is distinguished only in singular number but not in plural. In terms of linguistic
markedness In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant defau ...
, these languages neutralize the gender opposition in the plural, itself a marked category. So adjectives and pronouns have three forms in singular (
Bulgarian Bulgarian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the country of Bulgaria * Bulgarians, a South Slavic ethnic group * Bulgarian language, a Slavic language * Bulgarian alphabet * A citizen of Bulgaria, see Demographics of Bulgaria * Bul ...
, , or German , , ) but only one in plural (Bulgarian , German ) ll examples mean "red" As a consequence ''
pluralia tantum A ''plurale tantum'' (Latin for "plural only"; ) is a noun that appears only in the plural form and does not have a singular variant for referring to a single object. In a less strict usage of the term, it can also refer to nouns whose singular f ...
'' nouns (lacking a singular form) cannot be assigned a gender. Example with Bulgarian: (, "pincers"), (, "pants"), (, "spectacles"), (, "gills"). Other languages,
Serbo-Croatian Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and ...
, allow doubly marked forms both for number and gender. In these languages, each noun has a definite gender no matter the number. For example, "children" is feminine ''
singularia tantum A ''plurale tantum'' (Latin for "plural only"; ) is a noun that appears only in the plural form and does not have a singular variant for referring to a single object. In a less strict usage of the term, it can also refer to nouns whose singular fo ...
'' and "door" is neuter ''pluralia tantum''.


Grammatical gender can be realized on pronouns

Pronouns may agree in gender with the noun or noun phrase to which they refer (their antecedent). Sometimes, however, there is no antecedent—the referent of the pronoun is deduced indirectly from the context: this is found with personal pronouns, as well as with indefinite and dummy pronouns.


Personal pronouns

With personal pronouns, the gender of the pronoun is likely to agree with the ''natural gender'' of the referent. Indeed, in most European languages, personal pronouns are gendered; for example English (the
personal pronouns Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...
''he'', ''she'' and ''it'' are used depending on whether the referent is male, female, or inanimate or non-human; this is in spite of the fact that English does not generally have grammatical gender). A parallel example is provided by the object suffixes of verbs in
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...
, which correspond to object pronouns, and which also inflect for gender in the second person (though not in the first): * "I love you", said to a male: ' () * "I love you", said to a female: ' () Not all languages have gendered pronouns. In languages that never had grammatical gender, there is normally just one word for "he" and "she", like in
Indonesian Indonesian is anything of, from, or related to Indonesia, an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. It may refer to: * Indonesians, citizens of Indonesia ** Native Indonesians, diverse groups of local inhabitants of the archipelago ** Indonesian ...
, in Hungarian and in Turkish. These languages might only have different pronouns and inflections in the
third person Third person, or third-person, may refer to: * Third person (grammar), a point of view (in English, ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', and ''they'') ** Illeism, the act of referring to oneself in the third person * Third-person narrative, a perspective in p ...
to differentiate between people and inanimate objects, but even this distinction is often absent. (In written
Finnish Finnish may refer to: * Something or someone from, or related to Finland * Culture of Finland * Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland * Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people * Finnish cuisine See also ...
, for example, is used for "he" and "she" and for "it", but in the colloquial language is usually used for "he" and "she" as well.) For more on these different types of pronoun, see
Third-person pronoun Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...
. Issues may arise in languages with gender-specific pronouns in cases when the gender of the referent is unknown or not specified; this is discussed under
Gender-neutral language Gender-neutral language or gender-inclusive language is language that avoids bias towards a particular sex or gender. In English, this includes use of nouns that are not gender-specific to refer to roles or professions, formation of phrases in a c ...
, and in relation to English at Singular ''they''. In some cases the gender of a pronoun is not marked in the form of the pronoun itself, but is marked on other words by way of agreement. Thus the French word for "I" is , regardless of who is speaking; but this word becomes feminine or masculine depending on the sex of the speaker, as may be reflected through adjective agreement: ("I am strong", spoken by a female); (the same spoken by a male). In
null-subject language In linguistic typology, a null-subject language is a language whose grammar permits an independent clause to lack an explicit subject; such a clause is then said to have a null subject. In the principles and parameters framework, the null subj ...
s (and in some
elliptical Elliptical may mean: * having the shape of an ellipse, or more broadly, any oval shape ** in botany, having an elliptic leaf shape ** of aircraft wings, having an elliptical planform * characterised by ellipsis (the omission of words), or by conc ...
expressions in other languages), such agreement may take place even though the pronoun does not in fact appear. For example, in
Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...
: * " amvery grateful", said by a male: * the same, said by a female: The two sentences above mean literally "much obliged"; the adjective agrees with the natural gender of the speaker, that is, with the gender of the first person pronoun which does not appear explicitly here.


Indefinite and dummy pronouns

A
dummy pronoun A dummy pronoun is a deictic pronoun that fulfills a syntactical requirement without providing a contextually explicit meaning of its referent. As such, it is an example of exophora. Dummy pronouns are used in many Germanic languages, includin ...
is a type of pronoun used when a particular verb argument (such as the subject) is nonexistent, but when a reference to the argument is nevertheless syntactically required. They occur mostly in non-
pro-drop language A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping") is a language where certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they can be pragmatically or grammatically inferable. The precise conditions vary from language to language, and can be quite int ...
s, such as English (because in pro-drop languages the position of the argument can be left empty). Examples in English are the uses of ''it'' in "It's raining" and "It's nice to relax." When a language has gendered pronouns, the use of a particular word as a dummy pronoun may involve the selection of a particular gender, even though there is no noun to agree with. In languages with a neuter gender, a neuter pronoun is usually used, as in German ("it rains, it's raining"), where is the neuter third person singular pronoun. (English behaves similarly, because the word ''it'' comes from the
Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
neuter gender.) In languages with only masculine and feminine genders, the dummy pronoun may be the masculine third person singular, as in the French for "it's raining": (where means "he", or "it" when referring to masculine nouns); although some languages use the feminine, as in the equivalent
Welsh Welsh may refer to: Related to Wales * Welsh, referring or related to Wales * Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales * Welsh people People * Welsh (surname) * Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peop ...
sentence: (where the dummy pronoun is , which means "she", or "it" when referring to feminine nouns). A similar, apparently arbitrary gender assignment may need to be made in the case of
indefinite pronoun An indefinite pronoun is a pronoun which does not have a specific familiar referent. Indefinite pronouns are in contrast to definite pronouns. Indefinite pronouns can represent either count nouns or noncount nouns. They often have related for ...
s, where the referent is generally unknown. In this case the question is usually not which pronoun to use, but which gender to assign a given pronoun to (for such purposes as adjective agreement). For example, the French pronouns ("someone"), ("no-one") and ("something") are all treated as masculine—this is in spite of the fact that the last two correspond to feminine nouns ( meaning "person", and meaning "thing"). For other situations in which such a "default" gender assignment may be required, see below.


Grammatical vs. natural gender

The ''natural gender'' of a noun, pronoun or noun phrase is a gender to which it would be expected to belong based on relevant attributes of its referent. Although grammatical gender can coincide with natural gender, it need not.


Grammatical gender can match natural gender

This usually means masculine or feminine, depending on the referent's sex. For example, in
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Cana ...
, ("woman") is feminine whereas ("man") is masculine; these attributions occur solely due to the semantically inherent gender character of each noun.


Grammatical gender need not match natural gender

The ''grammatical gender'' of a noun does not always coincide with its natural gender. An example of this is the
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...
word ("girl"); this is derived from ("maiden"), umlauted to with the
diminutive suffix A diminutive is a root word that has been modified to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, either to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment. A (abbreviated ) is a word-formati ...
, and this suffix always makes the noun grammatically neuter. Hence the grammatical gender of is neuter, although its natural gender is feminine (because it refers to a female person). Other examples include: *
Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
(neuter) and (masculine), meaning "woman" *
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...
(neuter), meaning "woman" (the word is now pejorative and generally replaced with , originally 'lady', feminine of obsolete , meaning 'lord') *
Irish Irish may refer to: Common meanings * Someone or something of, from, or related to: ** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe ***Éire, Irish language name for the isle ** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit ...
(masculine) meaning "girl", and (feminine) meaning "stallion" *
Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent * Polish chicken *Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...
(masculine), meaning "unpleasant (usually old and ugly) woman" *
Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...
(masculine), meaning "voluptuous woman" *
Scottish Gaelic Scottish Gaelic ( gd, Gàidhlig ), also known as Scots Gaelic and Gaelic, is a Goidelic language (in the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family) native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a Goidelic language, Scottish Gaelic, as well as ...
(masculine), meaning "woman" *
Slovenian Slovene or Slovenian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Slovenia, a country in Central Europe * Slovene language, a South Slavic language mainly spoken in Slovenia * Slovenes The Slovenes, also known as Slovenians ( sl, Sloven ...
(neuter), meaning "girl" Normally, such exceptions are a small minority. When a noun with conflicting natural and grammatical gender is the antecedent of a pronoun, it may not be clear which gender of pronoun to choose. There is a certain tendency to keep the grammatical gender when a close back-reference is made, but to switch to natural gender when the reference is further away. For example, in German, the sentences "The girl has come home from school. She is now doing her homework" can be translated in two ways: * * Though the second sentence may appear grammatically incorrect ( constructio ad sensum), it is common in speech. With one or more intervening sentences, the second form becomes even more likely. However, a switch to the natural gender is never possible with articles and ''attributive'' pronouns or adjectives. Thus it can never be correct to say ("a girl" – with female indefinite article) or ("this little girl" – with female demonstrative pronoun and adjective). This phenomenon is quite popular in Slavic languages: for example Polish (deprecative "creature") is feminine but can be used to refer to both man (masculine gender), woman (feminine gender), child (neuter gender) or even animate nouns (e.g. a dog being masculine). Similarly with other deprecatory nouns as , , , , ("wuss, klutz"); ("mute") can be used deprecatively as described previously, and then can be used for verbs marked for the male and female genders.


Gender contrasts on human versus sentient referents

In the case of languages which have masculine and feminine genders, the relation between biological sex and grammatical gender tends to be less exact in the case of animals than in the case of people. In Spanish, for instance, a
cheetah The cheetah (''Acinonyx jubatus'') is a large cat native to Africa and central Iran. It is the fastest land animal, estimated to be capable of running at with the fastest reliably recorded speeds being , and as such has evolved specialized ...
is always (masculine) and a
zebra Zebras (, ) (subgenus ''Hippotigris'') are African equines with distinctive black-and-white striped coats. There are three living species: the Grévy's zebra (''Equus grevyi''), plains zebra (''E. quagga''), and the mountain zebra (''E. zeb ...
is always (feminine), regardless of their biological sex. In Russian a rat and a
butterfly Butterflies are insects in the macrolepidopteran clade Rhopalocera from the Order (biology), order Lepidoptera, which also includes moths. Adult butterflies have large, often brightly coloured wings, and conspicuous, fluttering flight. The ...
are always () and () (feminine). To specify the sex of an animal, an adjective may be added, as in ("a female cheetah"), or ("a male zebra"). Different names for the male and the female of a species are more frequent for common pets or farm animals, English ''cow'' and ''bull'', Spanish "cow" and "bull", Russian () "ram" and () "ewe". As regards the pronouns used to refer to animals, these generally agree in gender with the nouns denoting those animals, rather than the animals' sex (natural gender). In a language like English, which does not assign grammatical gender to nouns, the pronoun used for referring to objects (''it'') is often used for animals also. However, if the sex of the animal is known, and particularly in the case of companion animals, the gendered pronouns (''he'' and ''she'') may be used as they would be for a human. In
Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent * Polish chicken *Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...
, a few general words such as ("animal") or ("animal, one head of cattle") are neuter, but most species names are masculine or feminine. When the sex of an animal is known, it will normally be referred to using gendered pronouns consistent with its sex; otherwise the pronouns will correspond to the gender of the noun denoting its species.


Syntactic structure of grammatical gender

There are multiple theoretical approaches to the position and structure of gender in syntactic structures.


Categorization of nouns into genders

There are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders: * according to their form ( morphological) * according to logical or symbolic similarities in their meaning (
semantic Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...
) * according to arbitrary convention (lexical, possibly rooted in the language's history). In most languages that have grammatical gender, a combination of these three types of criteria is found, although one type may be more prevalent.


Form-based morphological criteria

In many languages, nouns are assigned to gender largely without any semantic basis—that is, not based on any feature (such as animacy or sex) of the person or thing that a noun represents. In such languages there may be a correlation, to a greater or lesser degree, between gender and the form of a noun (such as the vowel or consonant or syllable with which it ends). For example, in
Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...
and
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Cana ...
, nouns that end in or a consonant are mostly masculine, whereas those that end in are mostly feminine, regardless of their meaning. (Nouns that end in some other vowel are assigned a gender either according to
etymology Etymology ()The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) – p. 633 "Etymology /ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/ the study of the class in words and the way their meanings have changed throughout time". is the study of the history of the Phonological chan ...
, by analogy, or by some other convention.) These rules may override semantics in some cases: for example, the noun / ("member") is always masculine, even when it refers to a girl or a woman, and / ("person") is always feminine, even when it refers to a boy or a man, a kind of
form-meaning mismatch In linguistics, a form-meaning mismatch is a natural mismatch between the grammatical form and its expected meaning. Such form-meaning mismatches happen everywhere in language. Nevertheless, there is often an expectation of a one-to-one relation ...
. (In other cases, though, meaning takes precedence: the noun "communist" is masculine when it refers or could refer to a man, even though it ends with .) In fact, nouns in Spanish and Portuguese (as in the other
Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language fam ...
such as Italian and French) generally follow the gender of the Latin words from which they are derived. When nouns deviate from the rules for gender, there is usually an etymological explanation: ("problem") is masculine in Spanish because it was derived from a Greek noun of the neuter gender, whereas ("photo") and ("broadcast signal") are feminine because they are
clippings Clipping may refer to: Words * Clipping (morphology), the formation of a new word by shortening it, e.g. "ad" from "advertisement" * Clipping (phonetics), shortening the articulation of a speech sound, usually a vowel * Clipping (publications) ...
of and respectively, both grammatically feminine nouns. (Most Spanish nouns in are feminine; they derive from Latin feminines in , accusative .) But the opposite is correct with Northern
Kurdish language Kurdish (, ) is a language or a group of languages spoken by Kurds in the geo-cultural region of Kurdistan and the Kurdish diaspora. Kurdish constitutes a dialect continuum, belonging to Western Iranian languages in the Indo-European language ...
or
Kurmanci Kurmanji ( ku, کورمانجی, lit=Kurdish, translit=Kurmancî, also termed Northern Kurdish, is the northern dialect of the Kurdish languages, spoken predominantly in southeast Turkey, northwest and northeast Iran, northern Iraq, northern S ...
. For example, the words (member) and (friend) can be masculine or feminine according to the person they refer to. * (His daughter is my friend) * (His son is my friend)
Suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry ...
es often carry a specific gender. For example, in
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...
,
diminutive A diminutive is a root word that has been modified to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, either to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment. A (abbreviated ) is a word-formati ...
s with the suffixes and (meaning "little, young") are always neuter, even if they refer to people, as with ("girl") and ("young woman") (see
below Below may refer to: *Earth *Ground (disambiguation) *Soil *Floor *Bottom (disambiguation) Bottom may refer to: Anatomy and sex * Bottom (BDSM), the partner in a BDSM who takes the passive, receiving, or obedient role, to that of the top or ...
). Similarly, the suffix , which makes countable nouns from uncountable nouns ( "dough" → "piece of dough"), or personal nouns from abstract nouns ( "teaching", "punishment" → "apprentice", "convict") or adjectives ( "cowardly" → "coward"), always produces masculine nouns. And the German suffixes and (comparable with ''-hood'' and ''-ness'' in English) produce feminine nouns. In
Irish Irish may refer to: Common meanings * Someone or something of, from, or related to: ** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe ***Éire, Irish language name for the isle ** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit ...
, nouns ending in / and are always masculine, whereas those ending or are always feminine. In
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...
, nouns whose singular form ends in a ''
tāʾ marbūṭah Taw, tav, or taf is the twenty-second and last letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Tāw , Hebrew Tav , Aramaic Taw , Syriac Taw ܬ, and Arabic ت Tāʼ (22nd in abjadi order, 3rd in modern order). In Arabic, it is also gives ri ...
'' (traditionally a , becoming in
pausa In linguistics, pausa (Latin for 'break', from Greek παῦσις, ''pausis'' 'stopping, ceasing') is the hiatus between prosodic declination units. The concept is somewhat broad, as it is primarily used to refer to allophones that occur in cer ...
) are of feminine gender, the only significant exceptions being the word ("
caliph A caliphate or khilāfah ( ar, خِلَافَة, ) is an institution or public office under the leadership of an Islamic steward with the title of caliph (; ar, خَلِيفَة , ), a person considered a political-religious successor to th ...
") and certain masculine personal names ( ʾUsāmah). However, many masculine nouns have a "broken" plural form ending in a ''tāʾ marbūṭa''; for example ' ("male professor") has the plural , which might be confused for a feminine singular noun. Gender may also be predictable from the type of
derivation Derivation may refer to: Language * Morphological derivation, a word-formation process * Parse tree or concrete syntax tree, representing a string's syntax in formal grammars Law * Derivative work, in copyright law * Derivation proceeding, a proc ...
: for instance, the verbal nouns of Stem II (e.g. , from ) are always masculine. In French, nouns ending in tend to be feminine, whereas others tend to be masculine, but there are many exceptions to this ( , , , , are masculine as , , , , are feminine), note the many masculine nouns ending in preceded by double consonants. Certain suffixes are quite reliable indicators, such as , which when added to a verb ( "to park" → ; nettoyer "to clean" → "cleaning") indicates a masculine noun; however, when is part of the root of the word, it can be feminine, as in ("beach") or . On the other hand, nouns ending in , and are almost all feminine, with a few exceptions, such as , . Nouns can sometimes vary their form to enable the
derivation Derivation may refer to: Language * Morphological derivation, a word-formation process * Parse tree or concrete syntax tree, representing a string's syntax in formal grammars Law * Derivative work, in copyright law * Derivation proceeding, a proc ...
of differently gendered
cognate In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymology, etymological ancestor in a proto-language, common parent language. Because language c ...
nouns; for example, to produce nouns with a similar meaning but referring to someone of a different sex. Thus, in Spanish, means "boy", and means "girl". This paradigm can be exploited for making new words: from the masculine nouns "lawyer", "member of parliament" and "doctor", it was straightforward to make the feminine equivalents , , and . In the same way,
personal name A personal name, or full name, in onomastic terminology also known as prosoponym (from Ancient Greek πρόσωπον / ''prósōpon'' - person, and ὄνομα / ''onoma'' - name), is the set of names by which an individual person is known ...
s are frequently constructed with affixes that identify the sex of the bearer. Common feminine suffixes used in English names are ''-a'', of
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
or
Romance Romance (from Vulgar Latin , "in the Roman language", i.e., "Latin") may refer to: Common meanings * Romance (love), emotional attraction towards another person and the courtship behaviors undertaken to express the feelings * Romance languages, ...
origin ( ''Robert'' and ''Roberta''); and ''-e'', of French origin (cf. ''Justin'' and ''Justine''). Although gender inflection may be used to construct nouns and names for people of different sexes in languages that have grammatical gender, this alone does not constitute grammatical gender. Distinct words and names for men and women are also common in languages which do not have a grammatical gender system for nouns in general. English, for example, has feminine suffixes such as ''-ess'' (as in ''waitress''), and also distinguishes male and female personal names, as in the above examples.


Differentiation of personal names

Given names are proper nouns and they follow the same gender grammatical rules as common nouns. In most Indo-European languages female grammatical gender is created using an "a" or an "e" ending. Classical Latin typically made a grammatical feminine gender with ( "forest", "water") and this was reflected in feminine names originating in that period, like Emilia. Romance languages preserved this characteristic. For example, Spanish has approximately 89% feminine nouns with ending and 98% given names with the same ending. In the Germanic languages the female names have been Latinized by adding ''-e'' and ''-a'': Brunhild, Kriemhild and Hroswith became Brunhilde, Kriemhilde and Hroswitha. Slavic feminine given names: Olga (Russian), Małgorzata (Polish), Tetiana (Ukrainian), Oksana (Belarusian), Eliška (Czech), Bronislava (Slovak), Milica (Serbian), Darina (Bulgarian), Lucja (Croatian), Lamija (Bosnian) and Zala (Slovenian).


Differentiation of nouns with human referents

In some languages, nouns with human references have two forms, a male and a female one. This includes not only proper names, but also names for occupations and nationalities. Examples include: * English proper names: # male: ''Andrew'' # female: ''Andrea'' # neuter: ''Chris'' for both male and female * English occupation names # male: ''waiter'' # female: ''waitress'' # neuter: ''doctor'' for both male and female * Greek proper names () and () * Greek occupation names () "actor" for both male and female in Greek and () "doctor" for both, but with informal female variants () and () * Greek nationality names have five possibilities for 'English'. # male: () # female: () # masculine: () # feminine: () # neuter: () To complicate matters, Greek often offers additional informal versions of these. The corresponding for English are the following: (), (), (), (), (). The formal forms come from the name () "England", while the less formal are derived from Italian .


Meaning-based semantic criteria

In some languages, gender is determined by strictly semantic criteria, but in other languages, semantic criteria only partially determine gender.


Strict semantic criteria

In some languages, the gender of a noun is directly determined by its physical attributes (sex, animacy, etc.), and there are few or no exceptions to this rule. There are relatively few such languages. The
Dravidian languages The Dravidian languages (or sometimes Dravidic) are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan. Since the colonial era, there have been small but significant ...
use this system as described
below Below may refer to: *Earth *Ground (disambiguation) *Soil *Floor *Bottom (disambiguation) Bottom may refer to: Anatomy and sex * Bottom (BDSM), the partner in a BDSM who takes the passive, receiving, or obedient role, to that of the top or ...
. Another example is the
Dizi language Dizin (often called “Dizi” or “Maji” in the literature) is an Omotic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken by the Dizi people, primarily in the Maji woreda of the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region, located ...
, which has two asymmetrical genders. The feminine includes all living beings of female sex (e.g. woman, girl, cow...), and
diminutive A diminutive is a root word that has been modified to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, either to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment. A (abbreviated ) is a word-formati ...
s; the masculine encompasses all other nouns (e.g. man, boy, pot, broom...). In this language, feminine nouns are always marked with ''-e'' or ''-in''. Another African language, Defaka, has three genders: one for all male humans, one for all female humans, and a third for all the remaining nouns. Gender is only marked in personal pronouns. Standard English pronouns (see
below Below may refer to: *Earth *Ground (disambiguation) *Soil *Floor *Bottom (disambiguation) Bottom may refer to: Anatomy and sex * Bottom (BDSM), the partner in a BDSM who takes the passive, receiving, or obedient role, to that of the top or ...
) are very similar in this respect, although the English gendered pronouns (''he'', ''she'') are used for domestic animals if the sex of the animal is known, and sometimes for certain objects such as ships, e.g. "What happened to the Titanic? She (or it) sank."


Mostly semantic criteria

In some languages, the gender of nouns can mostly be determined by physical (semantic) attributes, although there remain some nouns whose gender is not assigned in this way (Corbett calls this "semantic residue"). The world view (e.g. mythology) of the speakers may influence the division of categories. * Zande has four genders: male human, female human, animal, and inanimate. However, there are about 80 nouns representing inanimate entities which are nonetheless animate in gender: heavenly objects (moon, rainbow), metal objects (hammer, ring), edible plants (sweet potato, pea), and non-metallic objects (whistle, ball). Many have a round shape or can be explained by the role they play in mythology. * Ket has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and most gender assignment is based on semantics, but there are many inanimate nouns outside the neuter class. Masculine nouns include male animates, most fish, trees, the moon, large wooden objects, most living beings and some religious items. Feminine nouns include female animates, three types of fish, some plants, the sun and other heavenly objects, some body parts and skin diseases, the soul, and some religious items. Words for part of a whole, as well as most other nouns that do not fall into any of the aforementioned classes, are neuter. The gender assignment of non-sex-differentiable things is complex. In general, those of no importance to the Kets are feminine, whereas objects of importance (e.g. fish, wood) are masculine. Mythology is again a significant factor. * Alamblak has two genders, masculine and feminine. However, the masculine also includes things which are tall or long and slender, or narrow (e.g. fish, snakes, arrows and slender trees), whereas the feminine gender has things which are short, squat or wide (e.g. turtles, houses, shields and squat trees). * In French, the distinction between the gender of a noun and the gender of the object it refers to is clear when nouns of different genders can be used for the same object, for example vélo (m.) = bicyclette (f.).


Contextual determination of gender

There are certain situations where the assignment of gender to a noun, pronoun or noun phrase may not be straightforward. This includes in particular: * groups of mixed gender; * references to people or things of unknown or unspecified gender. In languages with masculine and feminine gender, the masculine is usually employed by default to refer to persons of unknown gender, and to groups of people of mixed gender. Thus, in French the feminine plural pronoun always designates an all-female group of people (or stands for a group of nouns all of feminine gender), but the masculine equivalent may refer to a group of males or masculine nouns, to a mixed group, or to a group of people of unknown genders. In such cases, one says that the feminine gender is semantically marked, whereas the masculine gender is unmarked. In English, the problem of gender determination does not arise in the plural, because gender in that language is reflected only in pronouns, and the plural pronoun ''they'' does not have gendered forms. In the singular, however, the issue frequently arises when a person of unspecified or unknown gender is being referred to. In this case it has been traditional to use the masculine (''he''), but other solutions are now often preferred—see
Gender-neutral language Gender-neutral language or gender-inclusive language is language that avoids bias towards a particular sex or gender. In English, this includes use of nouns that are not gender-specific to refer to roles or professions, formation of phrases in a c ...
and Singular ''they''. In languages with a neuter gender, such as Slavic and
Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, Engli ...
, the neuter is often used for indeterminate gender reference, particularly when the things referred to are not people. In some cases this may even apply when referring to people, particularly children. For example, in English, one may use ''it'' to refer to a child, particularly when speaking generically rather than about a particular child of known sex. In Icelandic (which preserves a masculine–feminine–neuter distinction in both singular and plural), the neuter plural can be used for groups of people of mixed gender, when specific people are meant. For example: * 'They (n.pl) had met in the forest when the old woman (f.sg) was a young girl and the emperor (m.sg) was only a prince.' However, when referring to previously unmentioned groups of people or when referring to people in a generic way, especially when using an indefinite pronoun like 'some' or 'all', the masculine plural is used. For example: * 'Some people have the habit of talking to themselves.' An example contrasting the two ways to refer to groups is the following, taken from advertisements of Christian congregations announcing their meetings: * 'All welcome' is understood to be more general whereas is more specific and emphasises the individuality of the group members. That the masculine is seen in Icelandic as the most generic or 'unmarked' of the three genders can also be seen in the fact that the nouns for most professions are masculine. Even feminine job descriptions historically filled by women, like 'nurse' and 'nursery school teacher' (both f.sg), have been replaced with masculine ones as men have started becoming more represented in these professions: 'nurse' and 'nursery school teacher' (both m.sg). In
Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
(which has an overall common–neuter gender system), masculinity may be argued to be a marked feature, because in the weak adjectival declension there is a distinct ending () for naturally masculine nouns (as in , "my little brother"). In spite of this, the third-person singular masculine pronoun would normally be the default for a person of unknown gender, although in practice the indefinite pronoun and the reflexive or its possessive forms usually make this unnecessary. In
Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent * Polish chicken *Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...
, where a gender-like distinction is made in the plural between "masculine personal" and all other cases (see
below Below may refer to: *Earth *Ground (disambiguation) *Soil *Floor *Bottom (disambiguation) Bottom may refer to: Anatomy and sex * Bottom (BDSM), the partner in a BDSM who takes the passive, receiving, or obedient role, to that of the top or ...
), a group is treated as masculine personal if it contains at least one male person. In languages which preserve a three-way gender division in the plural, the rules for determining the gender (and sometimes number) of a coordinated noun phrase ("... and ...") may be quite complex.
Czech Czech may refer to: * Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe ** Czech language ** Czechs, the people of the area ** Czech culture ** Czech cuisine * One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus' Places * Czech, ...
is an example of such a language, with a division (in the plural) between masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine, and neuter. The rules for gender and number of coordinated phrases in that language are summarized at .


Arbitrary conventional criteria

In some languages, any gender markers have been so eroded over time (possibly through deflexion) that they are no longer recognizable. Many German nouns, for example, do not indicate their gender through either meaning or form. In such cases a noun's gender must simply be memorized, and gender can be regarded as an integral part of each noun when considered as an entry in the speaker's
lexicon A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Koine Greek language, Greek word (), neuter of () ...
. (This is reflected in
dictionaries A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, p ...
, which typically indicate the gender of noun
headword In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (plural ''lemmas'' or ''lemmata'') is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, ''break'', ''breaks'', ''broke'', ''broken'' and ''breaking'' ...
s where applicable.)
Second-language learner Language education – the process and practice of teaching a second or foreign language – is primarily a branch of applied linguistics, but can be an interdisciplinary field. There are four main learning categories for language education: ...
s are often encouraged to memorize a modifier, usually a
definite article An article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech. In English, both "the" and "a(n)" ar ...
, in conjunction with each noun—for example, a learner of French may learn the word for "chair" as (meaning "the chair"); this carries the information that the noun is , and that it is feminine (because is the feminine singular form of the definite article).


Gender shifts

It is possible for a noun to have more than one gender. Such gender shifts are sometimes correlated with meaning shifts, and sometimes yield doublets with no difference in meaning. Moreover, gender shifts sometimes crosscuts number contrasts, such that the singular form of a noun has one gender, and plural form of the noun has a different gender.


Some gender shifts are meaningful

Gender shift may be associated with a difference in the sex of the referent, as with nouns such as in Spanish, which may be either masculine or feminine, depending on whether it refers to a male or a female. It may also correspond to some other difference in the meaning of the word. For example, the German word meaning "lake" is masculine, whereas the identical word meaning "sea" is feminine. The meanings of the Norwegian noun have diverged further: masculine is "a thing", whereas neuter is "an assembly". (The parliament is the , "the Great "; the other s like are the regional courts. If someone may find it odd to simply call a Parliament "the thing", compare with the more notorious , the "public thing" of the Romans). It is a matter of analysis how to draw the line between a single
polysemous Polysemy ( or ; ) is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from ''monosemy'', where a word has a single ...
word with multiple genders and a set of
homonym In linguistics, homonyms are words which are homographs (words that share the same spelling, regardless of pronunciation), or homophones (equivocal words, that share the same pronunciation, regardless of spelling), or both. Using this definition, ...
s with one gender each. For example, Bulgarian has a pair of homonyms () which are etymologically unrelated. One is masculine and means "finger"; the other is feminine and means "soil".


Some gender shifts are meaningless

In other cases, a word may be usable in multiple genders indifferently. For example, in
Bulgarian Bulgarian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the country of Bulgaria * Bulgarians, a South Slavic ethnic group * Bulgarian language, a Slavic language * Bulgarian alphabet * A citizen of Bulgaria, see Demographics of Bulgaria * Bul ...
the word , (, "wilderness") may be either masculine (definite form , ) or feminine (definite form , ) without any change in meaning and no preference in usage. In Norwegian, many nouns can be either feminine or masculine according to the dialect, level of formality or whim of the speaker/writer. Even the two written forms of the language have many nouns whose gender is optional. Choosing the masculine gender will often seem more formal than using the feminine. This might be because before the creation of
Norwegian Nynorsk Nynorsk () () is one of the two written standards of the Norwegian language, the other being Bokmål. From 12 May 1885, it became the state-sanctioned version of Ivar Aasen's standard Norwegian language ( no, Landsmål) parallel to the Dano-Nor ...
and
Norwegian Bokmål Norwegian, Norwayan, or Norsk may refer to: *Something of, from, or related to Norway, a country in northwestern Europe *Norwegians, both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway *Demographics of Norway *The Norwegian language, including the ...
in the late 19th century, Norwegians wrote in Danish, which has lost the feminine gender, thus usage of the masculine gender (corresponding exactly to Danish common gender in conjugation in Norwegian Bokmål) is more formal sounding to modern Norwegians. The word for "sun" can be another example. One might decline it masculine: , or feminine: , in
Norwegian Bokmål Norwegian, Norwayan, or Norsk may refer to: *Something of, from, or related to Norway, a country in northwestern Europe *Norwegians, both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway *Demographics of Norway *The Norwegian language, including the ...
. The same goes for a lot of common words like (book), (doll), (bucket) and so forth. Many of the words where it is possible to choose gender are inanimate objects that one might suspect would be conjugated with the neuter gender. Nouns conjugated with the neuter gender cannot normally be conjugated as feminine or masculine in Norwegian. There is also a slight tendency towards using the masculine indefinite article even when choosing the feminine conjugation of a noun in many eastern Norwegian dialects. For instance, word for "girl" is declined: .


Some gender shifts are associated with number contrasts

Sometimes a noun's gender can change between plural and singular, as with the French words ("love"), ("delight") and ("organ" as musical instrument), all of which are masculine in the singular but feminine in the plural. These anomalies may have a historical explanation ( used to be feminine in the singular too) or result from slightly different notions ( in the singular is usually a
barrel organ A barrel organ (also called roller organ or crank organ) is a French mechanical musical instrument consisting of bellows and one or more ranks of pipes housed in a case, usually of wood, and often highly decorated. The basic principle is the sa ...
, whereas the plural usually refers to the collection of columns in a
church organ Carol Williams performing at the United States Military Academy West Point Cadet Chapel.">West_Point_Cadet_Chapel.html" ;"title="United States Military Academy West Point Cadet Chapel">United States Military Academy West Point Cadet Chapel. ...
). Further examples are the Italian words ("egg") and ("arm"). These are masculine in the singular, but form the irregular plurals and , which have the endings of the feminine singular, but have feminine plural agreement. (This is related to the forms of the
second declension The second declension is a category of nouns in Latin and Greek with similar case formation. In particular, these nouns are thematic, with an original ''o'' in most of their forms. In Classical Latin, the short ''o'' of the nominative and accusativ ...
Latin neuter nouns from which they derive: and , with nominative plurals and .) In other cases, the anomaly can be explained by the form of the noun, as is the case in
Scottish Gaelic Scottish Gaelic ( gd, Gàidhlig ), also known as Scots Gaelic and Gaelic, is a Goidelic language (in the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family) native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a Goidelic language, Scottish Gaelic, as well as ...
. Masculine nouns which form their plural by palatalization of their final consonant can change gender in their plural form, as a palatalized final consonant is often a marker of a feminine noun, e.g. ("small boy"), but ("small boys"), with the adjective showing agreement for both feminine gender (
lenition In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them more sonority hierarchy, sonorous. The word ''lenition'' itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronic analysis, s ...
of initial consonant) and plural number (suffixed ).


Gender across languages

Related languages need not assign the same gender to a noun: this shows that gender can vary across related languages. Conversely, unrelated languages that are in contact can impact how a borrowed noun is assigned gender, with either the borrowing or the donor language determining the gender of the borrowed word.


Gender can vary across related languages

Nouns which have the same meanings in different languages need not have the same gender. This is particularly so in the case of things with no natural gender, such as sexless objects. For example, there is, by all appearances, nothing about a table that should cause it to be associated with any particular gender, and different languages' words for "table" are found to have various genders: feminine, as with the French ; masculine, as with German ; or neuter, as with
Norwegian Norwegian, Norwayan, or Norsk may refer to: *Something of, from, or related to Norway, a country in northwestern Europe * Norwegians, both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway * Demographics of Norway *The Norwegian language, including ...
. (Even within a given language, nouns that denote the same concept may differ in gender—for example, of two German words for "car", is masculine whereas is neuter.)
Cognate In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymology, etymological ancestor in a proto-language, common parent language. Because language c ...
nouns in closely related languages are likely to have the same gender, because they tend to inherit the gender of the original word in the parent language. For instance, in the
Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language fam ...
, the words for "sun" are masculine, being derived from the Latin masculine noun , whereas the words for "moon" are feminine, being derived from the Latin feminine . (This contrasts with the genders found in German, where "sun" is feminine, and "moon" is masculine, as well as in other
Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, Engli ...
.) However, there are exceptions to this principle. For instance, ("milk") is masculine in Italian (as is French and Portuguese ), whereas Spanish is feminine and Romanian is neuter. Likewise, the word for "boat" is neuter in German (), but common gender in Swedish (). Some more examples of the above phenomena are given below. (These come mostly from the Slavic languages, where gender largely correlates with the noun ending.) * The Russian word ("moon") is feminine, whereas (" crescent moon", also meaning "month") is masculine. In Polish, another Slavic language, the word for moon is , which is masculine. * Russian also has two words for "potato": which is masculine, and which is feminine. * In Polish the loanword ("tram") is masculine, whereas the cognate loanword in Czech, , is feminine. In Romanian, is neuter. * The Polish word ("thousand") is masculine, whereas the cognate in Russian, тысяча, is feminine, while the Icelandic cognate is neuter. * The Spanish word ("origin") is masculine, but its close relatives (from Portuguese) and (from Galician and Asturian) are feminine. * The French word ("team") is feminine, while the Spanish word is masculine. The Spanish form contrasts with European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese , both of which are feminine. * The Italian word ("ape") is feminine, whereas the Spanish word is masculine. * The French word is feminine, but the Spanish cognate is generally masculine (except in some poetic contexts and among sea workers), whereas the Catalan cognate can be masculine or feminine, depending on the dialect. All these words mean "sea" and are descended from the Latin , which was neuter.


How languages assign gender to borrowed words

Borrowed words are assigned gender in one of two ways: * via criteria determined by the borrowing language; * via criteria determined by the donor language.


Borrowing language can determine gender

Ibrahim identifies several processes by which a language assigns a gender to a newly borrowed word; these processes follow patterns by which even children, through their subconscious recognition of patterns, can often correctly predict a noun's gender. # If the noun is animate, natural gender tends to dictate grammatical gender. # The borrowed word tends to take the gender of the native word it replaces. According to
Ghil'ad Zuckermann Ghil'ad Zuckermann ( he, גלעד צוקרמן, ; ) is an Israeli-born language revivalist and linguist who works in contact linguistics, lexicology and the study of language, culture and identity. Zuckermann is Professor of Linguistics and Ch ...
, morphemic adaptations of English words into American Italian or British Italian are abundant with such cases. For example, the feminine gender of the British Italian word "bag" was induced by the feminine gender of the Italian word "bag". # If the borrowed word happens to have a suffix that the borrowing language uses as a gender marker, the suffix tends to dictate gender. # If the borrowed word rhymes with one or more native words, the latter tend to dictate gender. # The default assignment is the borrowing language's unmarked gender. # Rarely, the word retains the gender it had in the donor language. This tends to happen more frequently in more formal language such as scientific terms, where some knowledge of the donor language can be expected. Sometimes the gender of a word switches with time. For example, the Russian modern loanword () "whisky" was originally feminine, then masculine, and today it has become neuter.


Donor language can determine gender

Ghil'ad Zuckermann Ghil'ad Zuckermann ( he, גלעד צוקרמן, ; ) is an Israeli-born language revivalist and linguist who works in contact linguistics, lexicology and the study of language, culture and identity. Zuckermann is Professor of Linguistics and Ch ...
argues that the cross-lingual retention of grammatical gender can change not only the lexis of the target language but also its morphology. For example, gender can indirectly influence the productivity of noun-patterns in what he calls the "
Israeli Israeli may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the State of Israel * Israelis, citizens or permanent residents of the State of Israel * Modern Hebrew, a language * ''Israeli'' (newspaper), published from 2006 to 2008 * Guni Israeli ...
" language: the Israeli neologism (, ) is fitted into the ''feminine'' noun-pattern ''mi⌂⌂é⌂et'' (each ⌂ represents a slot where a radical is inserted) because of the feminine gender of the matched words for "brush" such as Arabic , Yiddish , Russian , Polish () and , German and French , all feminine. Similarly, argues Zuckermann, the Israeli neologism for "library", (), matches the feminine gender of the parallel pre-existent European words: Yiddish , Russian , Polish , German and French , as well as of the pre-existent Arabic word for "library": (, also feminine. The result of this neologism might have been, more generally, the strengthening of Israeli () as a productive feminine locative suffix (combined with the influence of Polish and Russian ()).


Distribution of gender in the world's languages

Grammatical gender is a common phenomenon in the world's languages. A typological survey of 174 languages revealed that over one fourth of them had grammatical gender. Gender systems rarely overlap with numerical classifier systems. Gender and noun class systems are usually found in
fusional Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features. For e ...
or
agglutinating An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) tend to remai ...
languages, whereas classifiers are more typical of
isolating language An isolating language is a type of language with a morpheme per word ratio close to one, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples of widely spoken isolating languages a ...
s. Thus, according to
Johanna Nichols Johanna Nichols (born 1945, Iowa City, Iowa) is an American linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of C ...
, these characteristics correlate positively with the presence of grammatical gender in the world's languages: * location in an area with languages featuring noun classes; * preference for
head A head is the part of an organism which usually includes the ears, brain, forehead, cheeks, chin, eyes, nose, and mouth, each of which aid in various sensory functions such as sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Some very simple animals may ...
-marking morphology; * moderate to high morphological complexity; * non-accusative
alignment Alignment may refer to: Archaeology * Alignment (archaeology), a co-linear arrangement of features or structures with external landmarks * Stone alignment, a linear arrangement of upright, parallel megalithic standing stones Biology * Structu ...
. Grammatical gender is found in many
Indo-European languages The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...
(including
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Cana ...
, French,
Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
, and
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...
—but not
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...
,
Bengali Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...
,
Armenian Armenian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Armenia, a country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia * Armenians, the national people of Armenia, or people of Armenian descent ** Armenian Diaspora, Armenian communities across the ...
or
Persian Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...
, for example),
Afroasiatic languages The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic su ...
(which includes the Semitic and
Berber languages The Berber languages, also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight,, ber, label=Tuareg Tifinagh, ⵜⵎⵣⵗⵜ, ) are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related languages spoken by Berber commun ...
, etc.), and in other
language families A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in hi ...
such as Dravidian and
Northeast Caucasian The Northeast Caucasian languages, also called East Caucasian, Nakh-Daghestani or ''Vainakh-Daghestani'', is a family of languages spoken in the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia and in Northern Azerbaijan as well as in ...
, as well as several
Australian Aboriginal languages The Indigenous languages of Australia number in the hundreds, the precise number being quite uncertain, although there is a range of estimates from a minimum of around 250 (using the technical definition of 'language' as non-mutually intellig ...
such as Dyirbal, and
Kalaw Lagaw Ya ''Kalau Lagau Ya'', ''Kalaw Lagaw Ya'', ''Kala Lagaw Ya'' (), or the ''Western Torres Strait language'' (also several other names, see below), is the language indigenous to the central and western Torres Strait Islands, Queensland, Australia. O ...
. Most
Niger–Congo languages Niger–Congo is a hypothetical language family spoken over the majority of sub-Saharan Africa. It unites the Mande languages, the Atlantic-Congo languages (which share a characteristic noun class system), and possibly several smaller groups of ...
also have extensive systems of noun classes, which can be grouped into several grammatical genders. Conversely, grammatical gender is usually absent from the
Koreanic Koreanic is a small language family consisting of the Korean language, Korean and Jeju language, Jeju languages. The latter is often described as a dialect of Korean, but is distinct enough to be considered a separate language. Alexander Vovin s ...
,
Japonic Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan, sometimes also Japanic, is a language family comprising Japanese, spoken in the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages, spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. The family is universally accepted by linguists, and ...
, Tungusic, Turkic, Mongolic, Austronesian,
Sino-Tibetan Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...
,
Uralic The Uralic languages (; sometimes called Uralian languages ) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian (w ...
and most Native American language families. Modern English makes use of gender in pronouns, which are generally marked for natural gender, but lacks a system of gender concord within the
noun phrase In linguistics, a noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently oc ...
which is one of the central elements of grammatical gender in most other Indo-European languages.


Indo-European

Many
Indo-European languages The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...
, but not English, provide examples of grammatical gender. Research indicates that the earliest stages of
Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-E ...
had two genders (animate and inanimate), as did Hittite, the earliest attested Indo-European language. The classification of nouns based on animacy and inanimacy and the lack of gender are today characteristic of
Armenian Armenian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Armenia, a country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia * Armenians, the national people of Armenia, or people of Armenian descent ** Armenian Diaspora, Armenian communities across the ...
. According to the theory, the animate gender, which (unlike the inanimate) had independent vocative and accusative forms, later split into masculine and feminine, thus originating the three-way classification into masculine, feminine and neuter. Many Indo-European languages retained the three genders, including most
Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Ear ...
,
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
,
Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
, Ancient and Modern
Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
,
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...
, Icelandic,
Romanian Romanian may refer to: *anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania **Romanians, an ethnic group **Romanian language, a Romance language ***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language **Romanian cuisine, traditional ...
and Asturian (two Romance language exceptions). In them, there is a high but not absolute correlation between grammatical gender and
declension In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and ar ...
al class. Many linguists believe that to be true of the middle and late stages of Proto-Indo-European. However, many languages reduced the number of genders to two. Some lost the neuter, leaving masculine and feminine like most
Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language fam ...
(see . A few traces of the neuter remain, such as the distinct
Spanish pronoun Spanish pronouns in some ways work quite differently from their English counterparts. Subject pronouns are often omitted, and object pronouns come in clitic and non-clitic forms. When used as clitics, object pronouns can appear as proclitics th ...
and Italian nouns with so-called "mobile gender"), as well as Hindustani and the
Celtic languages The Celtic languages ( usually , but sometimes ) are a group of related languages descended from Proto-Celtic. They form a branch of the Indo-European language family. The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward ...
. Others merged feminine and masculine into a common gender but retained the neuter, as in
Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
and
Danish Danish may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the country of Denmark People * A national or citizen of Denmark, also called a "Dane," see Demographics of Denmark * Culture of Denmark * Danish people or Danes, people with a Danish a ...
(and, to some extent,
Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...
; see
Gender in Danish and Swedish In standard Danish and Swedish, nouns have two grammatical genders, and pronouns have the same two grammatical genders in addition to two natural genders similar to English. Overview Historically, nouns in standard Danish and Swedish, like ...
and
Gender in Dutch grammar In the Dutch language, the gender of a noun determines the articles, adjective forms and pronouns that are used in reference to that noun. Gender is a complicated topic in Dutch, because depending on the geographical area or each individual spea ...
). Finally, some languages, such as English and
Afrikaans Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans gra ...
, have nearly completely lost grammatical gender (retaining only some traces, such as the English pronouns ''he'', ''she'', ''they'', and ''it''—Afrikaans , , , and );
Armenian Armenian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Armenia, a country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia * Armenians, the national people of Armenia, or people of Armenian descent ** Armenian Diaspora, Armenian communities across the ...
,
Bengali Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...
,
Persian Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...
,
Sorani Central Kurdish (), also called Sorani (), is a Kurdish dialect or a language that is spoken in Iraq, mainly in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as the provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and West Azerbaijan in western Iran. Sorani is one of the two o ...
,
Ossetic Ossetian (, , ), commonly referred to as Ossetic and rarely as Ossete (), is an Eastern Iranian language that is spoken predominantly in Ossetia, a region situated on both sides of the Greater Caucasus. It is the native language of the Ossetia ...
,
Odia Odia, also spelled Oriya or Odiya, may refer to: * Odia people in Odisha, India * Odia language, an Indian language, belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family * Odia alphabet, a writing system used for the Odia languag ...
,
Khowar Khowar () or Chitrali, is an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken in Chitral and surrounding areas in Pakistan. Khowar is the lingua franca of Chitral, and it is also spoken in the Gupis-Yasin and Ghizer districts of Gilgit-Baltistan, as ...
, and
Kalasha A kalasha, also spelled kalash or kalasa, also called ghat or ghot ( sa, कलश , Telugu: కలశము Kannada: ಕಳಶ literally "pitcher, pot"), is a metal (brass, copper, silver or gold) pot with a large base and small mouth, large eno ...
have lost it entirely. On the other hand, some
Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Ear ...
can be argued to have added new genders to the classical three (see
below Below may refer to: *Earth *Ground (disambiguation) *Soil *Floor *Bottom (disambiguation) Bottom may refer to: Anatomy and sex * Bottom (BDSM), the partner in a BDSM who takes the passive, receiving, or obedient role, to that of the top or ...
).


Germanic: English

Although grammatical gender was a fully productive inflectional category in
Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
, Modern English has a much less pervasive gender system, primarily based on natural gender and reflected essentially in pronouns only. There are a few traces of gender marking in Modern English: * Some words take different
derived Derive may refer to: * Derive (computer algebra system), a commercial system made by Texas Instruments * ''Dérive'' (magazine), an Austrian science magazine on urbanism *Dérive, a psychogeographical concept See also * *Derivation (disambiguatio ...
forms depending on the natural gender of the referent, such as ''waiter/waitress'' and ''widow/widower''. * The third-person singular
personal pronouns Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...
(and their possessive forms) are gender specific: ''he/him/his'' (masculine gender, used for men, boys, and male animals), ''she/her(s)'' (feminine gender, for women, girls, and female animals), the
singular Singular may refer to: * Singular, the grammatical number that denotes a unit quantity, as opposed to the plural and other forms * Singular homology * SINGULAR, an open source Computer Algebra System (CAS) * Singular or sounder, a group of boar, ...
''they/them/their(s)'' (common gender, used for people or animals of unknown, irrelevant, or non-binary gender), and ''it/its'' (neuter gender, mainly for objects, abstractions and animals). (There are also distinct personal and non-personal forms but no differentiation by natural gender in the case of certain interrogative and
relative pronouns A relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause. It serves the purpose of conjoining modifying information about an antecedent referent. An example is the word ''which'' in the sentence "This is the house which Jack built." Here the ...
: ''who/whom'' for persons, corresponding to ''he'', ''she'', and the singular ''they''; and ''which'' corresponding to ''it''.) However, these are relatively insignificant features compared with a typical language with full grammatical gender. English nouns are not generally considered to belong to gender classes in the way that French, German or Russian nouns are. There is no gender agreement in English between nouns and their modifiers (
article Article often refers to: * Article (grammar), a grammatical element used to indicate definiteness or indefiniteness * Article (publishing), a piece of nonfictional prose that is an independent part of a publication Article may also refer to: G ...
s, other
determiner A determiner, also called determinative (abbreviated ), is a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and generally serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context. That is, a determiner m ...
s, or
adjective In linguistics, an adjective (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that generally grammatical modifier, modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Tra ...
s, with the occasional exception such as ''blond/blonde'', a spelling convention borrowed from French). Gender agreement applies in effect only to pronouns, and the choice of pronoun is determined based on semantics (perceived qualities of the thing being referred to) rather than on any conventional assignment of particular nouns to particular genders. Only a relatively small number of English nouns have distinct male and female forms; many of them are
loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because th ...
s from non-
Germanic language The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, Engli ...
s (the suffixes ''-rix'' and ''-ress'' in words such as ''aviatrix'' and ''waitress'', for instance, derive directly or indirectly from Latin). English has no live
productive Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production proces ...
gender markers. An example of such a marker might be the suffix ''-ette'' (of French provenance), but this is seldom used today, surviving mostly in either historical contexts or with disparaging or humorous intent. The gender of an English pronoun typically coincides with the natural gender of its referent, rather than with the grammatical gender of its antecedent. The choice between ''she'', ''he'', ''they'', and ''it'' comes down to whether the pronoun is intended to designate a woman, a man, or someone or something else. There are certain exceptions, however: * With animals, ''it'' is usually used, but when the sex of the animal is known, it may be referred to as ''he'' or ''she'' (particularly when expressing an emotional connection with the animal, as with a
pet A pet, or companion animal, is an animal kept primarily for a person's company or entertainment rather than as a working animal, livestock, or a laboratory animal. Popular pets are often considered to have attractive appearances, intelligence, ...
). See also above. * Certain nonhuman things can be referred to with the pronoun ''she'' (''her'', ''hers''), particularly countries and ships, and sometimes other vehicles or machines. See . This usage is considered a metaphorical
figure of speech A figure of speech or rhetorical figure is a word or phrase that intentionally deviates from ordinary language use in order to produce a rhetorical effect. Figures of speech are traditionally classified into '' schemes,'' which vary the ordinary ...
; it is also in decline, and advised against by most journalistic style guides.''
The Chicago Manual of Style ''The Chicago Manual of Style'' (abbreviated in writing as ''CMOS'' or ''CMS'', or sometimes as ''Chicago'') is a style guide for American English published since 1906 by the University of Chicago Press. Its 17 editions have prescribed writi ...
'', 15th edition, 2003, p. 356. .
Problems arise when selecting a personal pronoun to refer to someone of unspecified or unknown gender (see also above). In the past and to some degree still in the present, the masculine has been used as the "default" gender in English. The use of the plural pronoun ''they'' with singular reference is common in practice. The neuter ''it'' may be used for a baby but not normally for an older child or adult. (Other genderless pronouns exist, such as the impersonal pronoun ''one'', but they are not generally substitutable for a personal pronoun.) For more information see
Gender-neutral language Gender-neutral language or gender-inclusive language is language that avoids bias towards a particular sex or gender. In English, this includes use of nouns that are not gender-specific to refer to roles or professions, formation of phrases in a c ...
and Singular ''they''.


Slavic languages

The
Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Ear ...
mostly continue the Proto-Indo-European system of three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. Gender correlates largely with noun endings (masculine nouns typically end in a consonant, feminines in and neuters in or ) but there are many exceptions, particularly in the case of nouns whose stems end in a
soft consonant In phonetics, palatalization (, also ) or palatization is a way of pronouncing a consonant in which part of the tongue is moved close to the hard palate. Consonants pronounced this way are said to be palatalized and are transcribed in the Internat ...
. However, some of the languages, including
Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
,
Czech Czech may refer to: * Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe ** Czech language ** Czechs, the people of the area ** Czech culture ** Czech cuisine * One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus' Places * Czech, ...
, Slovak and
Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent * Polish chicken *Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...
, also make certain additional grammatical distinctions between
animate Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most anima ...
and inanimate nouns: Polish in the plural, and Russian in the accusative case, differentiate between human and non-human nouns. In Russian, the different treatment of animate nouns involves their accusative case (and that of adjectives qualifying them) being formed identically to the genitive rather than to the nominative. In the singular that applies to masculine nouns only, but in the plural it applies in all genders. See
Russian declension In Russian grammar, the system of declension is elaborate and complex. Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, demonstratives, most numerals and other particles are declined for two grammatical numbers (singular and plural) and six grammatical cases ; some of ...
. A similar system applies in Czech, but the situation is somewhat different in the plural: Only masculine nouns are affected, and the distinctive feature is a distinct inflective ending for masculine animate nouns in the nominative plural and for adjectives and verbs agreeing with those nouns. See
Czech declension Czech declension is a complex system of grammatically determined modifications of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals in Czech, one of the Slavic languages. Czech has seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locati ...
. Polish might be said to distinguish five genders: personal masculine (referring to male humans), animate non-personal masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter. The animate–inanimate opposition for the masculine gender applies in the singular, and the personal–impersonal opposition, which classes animals along with inanimate objects, applies in the plural. (A few nouns denoting inanimate things are treated grammatically as animate and vice versa.) The manifestations of the differences are as follows: * In the singular, masculine animates (in the standard declension) have an accusative form identical to the genitive, and masculine inanimates have accusative identical to the nominative. The same applies to adjectives qualifying these nouns, the same as in Russian and Czech. Also, Polish masculine animates always form their genitive in , whereas in the case of inanimates some use and some : ::animate: ("good customer"; nominative); (accusative and genitive) ::animate: ("good dog"; nominative); (accusative and genitive) ::inanimate: ("good cheese"; nominative and accusative); (genitive only) * In the plural, masculine personal nouns (but not other animate nouns) take accusatives that are identical to the genitives; they also typically take different endings in the nominative (e.g. rather than ). Such endings also appear on adjectives and past tense verbs. The two features are analogous to features of Russian and Czech respectively, except that those languages make an animate/inanimate distinction rather than personal/impersonal) . Examples of the Polish system: ::personal: ("good customers"; nominative); (accusative and genitive) ::impersonal: ("good dogs"; nominative and accusative); (genitive only) ::impersonal: ("good cheeses"; nominative and accusative); (genitive only) A few nouns have both personal and impersonal forms, depending on meaning (for example, may behave as an impersonal noun when it refers to a
client Client(s) or The Client may refer to: * Client (business) * Client (computing), hardware or software that accesses a remote service on another computer * Customer or client, a recipient of goods or services in return for monetary or other valuable ...
in the computing sense). For more information on the above inflection patterns, see
Polish morphology The morphology of the Polish language is characterised by a fairly regular system of inflection (conjugation and declension) as well as word formation. Certain regular or common alternations apply across the Polish morphological system, affecting w ...
. For certain rules concerning the treatment of mixed-gender groups, see above.


Dravidian

In the
Dravidian languages The Dravidian languages (or sometimes Dravidic) are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan. Since the colonial era, there have been small but significant ...
, nouns are classified primarily on the basis of their semantic properties. The highest-level classification of nouns is often described as being between "rational" and "nonrational". Nouns representing humans and
deities A deity or god is a supernatural being who is considered divine or sacred. The ''Oxford Dictionary of English'' defines deity as a god or goddess, or anything revered as divine. C. Scott Littleton defines a deity as "a being with powers greate ...
are considered rational, and other nouns (those representing animals and objects) are treated as nonrational. Within the rational class there are further subdivisions into masculine, feminine and
collective noun In linguistics, a collective noun is a word referring to a collection of things taken as a whole. Most collective nouns in everyday speech are not specific to one kind of thing. For example, the collective noun "group" can be applied to people (" ...
s. For further information, see
Tamil grammar Much of Tamil grammar is extensively described in the oldest available grammar book for Tamil, the ''Tolkāppiyam'' (dated between 300 BCE and 300 CE). Modern Tamil writing is largely based on the 13th century grammar '' Naṉṉūl'', which rest ...
.


Austronesian

In the Austronesian
Wuvulu-Aua language The Wuvulu-Aua language is spoken on Wuvulu and Aua Islands by speakers scattered around the Manus Province of Papua New Guinea. Although the Wuvulu-Aua language has a similar grammatical structure, word order, and tense to other Oceanic lang ...
,
vocative In grammar, the vocative Grammatical case, case (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which is used for a noun that identifies a person (animal, object, etc.) being addressed, or occasionally for the noun modifiers ...
words used when addressing a relative often specify the speaker's gender. For example, means 'sister of female', means opposite-gender sibling, and means female's father's sister or female's brother's daughter.


See also

*
Gender-neutral language Gender-neutral language or gender-inclusive language is language that avoids bias towards a particular sex or gender. In English, this includes use of nouns that are not gender-specific to refer to roles or professions, formation of phrases in a c ...
*
Gender neutrality in genderless languages A genderless language is a natural or constructed language that has no distinctions of grammatical gender—that is, no categories requiring morphological agreement between nouns and associated pronouns, adjectives, articles, or verbs. The no ...
*
Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender is the usage of wording that is balanced in its treatment of the genders in a non-grammatical sense. For example, advocates of gender-neutral language challenge the traditional use of masc ...
*
Gender-neutral language in English Gender-neutral language is language that minimizes assumptions about the social gender or biological sex of people referred to in speech or writing. In contrast to most other Indo-European languages, English does not retain grammatical gender and ...
*
Gender-specific job title A gender-specific job title is a name of a job that also specifies or implies the gender of the person performing that job. For example, in English, the job title ''stewardess'' implies that the person is female. A gender-neutral job title, on the ...
*
Generic antecedents Generic antecedents are representatives of classes, referred to in ordinary language by another word (most often a pronoun), in a situation in which gender is typically unknown or irrelevant. These mostly arise in generalizations and are particul ...
*
Grammatical conjugation In linguistics, conjugation () is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (alteration of form according to rules of grammar). For instance, the verb ''break'' can be conjugated to form the words ''break'', ...
*
Polarity of gender In linguistics, polarity of gender is when a lexical item takes the opposite grammatical gender than expected. The phenomenon is widespread in Afroasiatic languages such as Semitic and Cushitic tongues. For example, in Somali, which is a Cushitic ...


Notes


References


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. * * * * Greenberg, J. H. (1978) "How does a language acquire gender markers?" In 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. * * Iturrioz, J. L. (1986) "Structure, meaning and function: a functional analysis of gender and other classificatory techniques". ''Función'' 1. 1–3. * Mercier, Adele (2002) "L'homme et la factrice: sur la logique du genre en français". "Dialogue", Volume 41, Issue 3, 2002 * Pinker, Steven (1994) ''
The Language Instinct ''The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language'' is a 1994 book by Steven Pinker, written for a general audience. Pinker argues that humans are born with an innate capacity for language. He deals sympathetically with Noam Chomsky's claim t ...
'', William Morrow and Company. * Di Garbo F, Olsson B, Wälchli B (eds.). 2019. Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity I: General issues and specific studies. Berlin: Language Science Press. . . Open Access. http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/223 * Di Garbo F, Olsson B, Wälchli B (eds.). 2019. Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity II: World-wide comparative studies. Berlin: Language Science Press. . Open Access. http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/237


External links


An overview of the grammar of Old English
at ucalgary.ca * *
doi: Grammatical Features Inventory
at Surrey Morphology Group
The Exceptions: European Male Names Ending in A
at NamepediA Blog {{DEFAULTSORT:Grammatical Gender Linguistic morphology