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Grammatical gender
*** Shopping-Tip: Grammatical gender
In linguistics, '''grammatical
genders''', also called '''noun classes''', are certain types of
inflections according to which nouns can be divided into categories with
semantics semantic or
Morphology_%28linguistics%29 morphological significance. Grammatical gender is analogous to
grammatical number, except that it denotes qualities rather than quantities. In
Indo-European languages, grammatical genders overlap to a great extent with
natural gender when the nouns designate human beings, although the overlap is often not complete. But in nouns that do not refer to human beings, there may be no association whatsoever between grammatical gender and natural gender, not even of a symbolic kind. Furthermore, in other language families, such as the
Niger-Congo, genders can be based on criteria that are not sexual at all (some authors prefer to reserve the term "noun classes" for this case).
Lexical marking of gender
Languages without true grammatical gender can have quite pervasive lexical marking of natural gender. This should '''not''' be confused with grammatical gender. A notable example is the
suffix ''-ino'', in
Esperanto, which can be used to change ''patro'', "father" into ''patrino'', "mother." This particular suffix is extremely productive (there is ''no'' atomic term for "mother" in Esperanto), leading some people to the erroneous assumption that it is a grammatical rather than a lexical gender marker.
In
Spanish language Spanish, the suffix ''-o'' is characteristic of masculine nouns and the suffix ''-a'' is characteristic of feminine nouns. Thus, ''niño'' means “boy�, and ''niña'' means “girl�. This allows
neologisms to be readily created, by analogy: given the noun ''empresario'' (businessman), it was straightforward to make the new noun ''empresaria'' for “businesswoman�. This kind of gender shift can also have more subtle uses, such as making a collective noun like ''fruta'' (group of fruits) from a singular noun like ''fruto'' (fruit).
English has some lexical markers of gender in nouns, which however are seldom used, and usually with humorous intent. For example, the suffix ''-ette'' (of
French language French provenience) in ''rockette'', from ''rocket''.
Personal pronouns
Personal
pronoun pronouns often have different forms based on the natural gender of their
referent; this is again not the same as grammatical gender. English distinguishes between ''he'' (male person), ''she'' (female person), and ''it'' (object, abstraction, or animal). Although ''he'' and ''she'' may be used for animals, particularly pets, by extension, and sometimes ''she'' is used to refer to countries, boats or machines, this is an exceptional and poetic use. In modern English, the personal pronouns essentially denote
natural gender. (But see the example of
Old English, below.)
Gendered pronouns and their corresponding inflections vary considerably across languages: some of them have different pronouns and inflections in the third person only to differentiate between humans and inanimate objects, as is the case of
Hungarian language Hungarian and
Finnish language Finnish (though this distinction is commonly waived away in spoken Finnish). Finnish, which never had grammatical genders, uses the same pronoun, ''hän'', for "he" and "she". Modern Japanese has a peculiar distinction of verbs between animate and inanimate in existential sentences; ''aru'' is for inanimate, ''iru'' is for animate. In negative sentences, ''nai'' (adjective) and ''inai'' are used, respectively.
Personal names
Personal
names often have language-specific forms that identify the gender of the bearer. For example, in an English-speaking culture, ''John'' (masculine) and ''Joan'' or ''Jane'' (feminine) are gendered variants on the
Hebrew language Hebrew name of
John the Evangelist. Common feminine suffixes used in English names are ''-a'', of Latin or Romance origin (cf. ''Robert'' and ''Roberta'') and ''-e'', of French origin (cf. ''Justin'' and ''Justine''). Once more, this is a lexical marking of natural gender, not grammatical gender.
For
Russian language Russian gender-related tradition of personal naming, see
Names in Russian Empire, Soviet Union and CIS countries.
Grammatical gender proper
Strictly speaking, a language only has grammatical gender when a change in the gender of a
noun induces
Morphology_%28linguistics%29 morphological changes in
modifiers and other
parts of speech (such as
verbs) that refer to that noun. For example, consider the sentences "The man is tall" and "The woman is tall". In English, the only difference between them are the nouns "man/woman", which represent
natural gender. In Spanish, by contrast, one says "''El hombre es alto''" and "''La mujer es alta''", respectively. Not only do the words for "man" and "woman" change, (''hombre'' vs. ''mujer''), but so do the article (''el'', ''la'') and the adjective (''alto'', ''alta''). When a noun belongs to a certain gender, other parts of speech that refer to that noun must be
inflection inflected to be in the same class. These obligatory changes are called gender agreement.
Only when a language exhibits gender agreement do we say that it has grammatical genders (or noun classes). Thus grammatical gender need not exist, and in fact it is not present in Modern English. This was not always the case, however. Curzan illustrates gender agreement in
Old English with the following “highly contrived� example:
: ''Seo brade lind wæs tilu and ic hire lufod.''
: (Literal translation:) That broad shield was good and I loved her.
Since the noun ''lind'' (shield) is grammatically feminine, the pronoun ''seo'' (the, that) and the adjectives ''brade'' (broad) and ''tilu'' (good), which refer to ''lind'', must also appear in their feminine forms, as well as the pronoun ''hire'' (her), which adopts the grammatical gender of its referent.
For comparison, in Modern English the sentence would be:
: ''That broad shield was good and I loved it.''
Here, the ''shield'' is understood as a sexless object, and therefore designated by the neuter pronoun ''it''. There is only a lexical marking of gender.
Old English had three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, but gender inflections (as well as number inflections) were greatly simplified, and then merged with one another. The only trace of grammatical gender left in modern
English language English are the third person singular pronouns, which simply represent natural gender. Therefore, English lacks grammatical gender. This is unusual for an
Indo-European language (another example is
Afrikaans language Afrikaans), but not uncommon in other language families.
Sino-Tibetan languages, for instance, usually do not have grammatical gender.
Languages may also evidence noun classes in other ways.
Welsh language Welsh provides a good example. On the whole, gender marking has been lost in Welsh, both on the noun, and, often, on the adjective. However, it has one unusual feature, that of
consonant mutation initial mutation, where the first consonant changes to another in certain places. In Welsh, gender can cause mutation, especially the
soft mutation. For instance, the word ''merch'' means girl or daughter. However 'the girl' is ''y ferch''. This only occurs with feminine nouns, masculine nouns remain unchanged after the definite article (for example ''mab'' — 'son', ''y mab'' — 'the son'). Gender also affects following adjectives in a similar way, for instance 'the large girl' is ''y ferch fawr'', but 'the large son' is ''y mab mawr''.
Curzan's example in Old English above illustrates another important fact: even the name of an inanimate object like "shield" has a grammatical gender. All nouns must have a gender, in a language with noun classes. (Some nouns may belong to more than one noun class, according to their meaning.) But what makes a shield grammatically "feminine"? Three main types of criteria are commonly used to define noun classes:
semantics,
Morphology_%28linguistics%29 morphology, and
Convention_%28norm%29 convention. (See below.) Grammatical gender was mostly conventional in Old English.
Noun classes and semantics
In
Alamblak, a
Sepik Hill language spoken in
Papua New Guinea, the masculine gender includes males and things which are tall or long and slender, or narrow such as fish, crocodile, long snakes, arrows, spears and tall slender trees, and the feminine gender includes females and things which are short, squat or wide, such as turtles, frogs, houses, fighting shields, and trees that are typically more round and squat than others. A more or less discernible correlation between noun gender and the shape of the respective object is also found in some languages, even in the Indo-European family. The
Algonquian languages classify nouns into ''animate'' and ''inanimate''.
Niger-Congo languages can have ten or more noun classes, defined according to non-sexual criteria. For instance, in
Swahili nouns that begin with ''m-'' in the singular and ''wa-'' in the plural denote persons, and nouns that begin with ''m-'' in the singular but ''mi-'' in the plural denote plants. In the sentence below, the
Marker (linguistics) class marker ''ki-'' (marking singular nouns in class number 7) shows up on both the
adjective (''-kubwa'') and the
verb (''-anguka''), to express their relation to the class 7 noun ''kitabu'' 'book':
:'''ki'''tabu '''ki'''kubwa '''ki'''naanguka
(cl.7-book cl.7-big cl.7-
PRESENT-fall)
:'The big book falls.'
Common criteria for defining noun classes include:
* animate vs. inanimate (as in
Ojibwe language Ojibwe)
* rational vs. non-rational (as in
Tamil language Tamil)
* human vs. non-human
* male vs. other
* male human vs. other
* masculine vs. feminine (as in most
Romance languages)
* masculine vs. feminine vs. neuter (as in most
Slavic languages)
* strong vs. weak
* augmentative vs. diminutive
Some languages, such as
japanese language Japanese,
Chinese language Chinese and the
Tai languages, have elaborate systems of
measure words which classify nouns into types based on shape and function, but are only used with counting
modifiers. Because the classes of nouns created by these measure words are not generally distinguished in other contexts, many if not most linguists take the view that they do not create noun classes.
Noun classes and morphology
In
Spanish language Spanish, grammatical gender is overwhelmingly determined by noun
Morphology_%28linguistics%29 morphology: most nouns that end in ''-o'' or a consonant are masculine and most nouns that end in ''-a'' are feminine. Nouns that end in some other vowel are assigned a gender either according to
etymology, or by an arbitrary convention. Other than in nouns that refer to human beings or animals, there is no semantic value to the labels "masculine" and "feminine". The
correlation between grammatical gender and morphology may, however, have some exceptions. Thus, although the suffix ''-o'' is characteristic of the masculine gender and the suffix ''-a'' is typical of the feminine in Spanish, ''problema'' (problem) is masculine, and ''radio'' (radio station) is feminine.
Sometimes, morphology overrides semantics. The most cited example of this is the
German language German word ''Mädchen'', which means "girl", but grammatically has neuter gender. This is because ''Mädchen'' is the
diminutive of ''Maid'' (archaic nowadays), and diminutive suffixes such as ''-chen'' and ''-lein'' make words neuter. Similarly, the Spanish noun ''miembro'' (member) is always masculine, even when it refers to a woman, but ''persona'' (person) is always feminine, even when it refers to a man.
Noun classes and convention
Not all languages with noun classes exhibit these markings. Most German nouns give no morphological or semantic clue as to their gender. It is a
Convention (norm) convention which must simply be memorized. The conventional aspect of grammatical gender is very clear when one considers that there is nothing intrinsic in a table which makes it masculine, as in German ''Tisch'', or neuter, as in Norwegian ''bord''.
Whether a distant ancestor of Norwegian, German, Spanish and English had a semantic value for genders is of course a different matter. Some authors have speculated that archaic
Proto-Indo-European had two genders, animate and inanimate.
Animals and grammatical gender
The relation between grammatical gender and natural gender is often different for animals from what it is for human beings. In Spanish, a cheetah is always ''un guepardo'' (masculine) and a zebra is always ''una cebra'' (feminine), regardless of their biological sex. If it becomes necessary to specify the sex of the animal, an adjective is added, as in ''un guepardo hembra'' (a female cheetah). Individualized names for the male and the female of a species are more frequent when they refer to common pets or farm animals. Eg. English ''horse'' and ''mare'', French ''chat'' (male cat) and ''chatte'' (female cat).
Noun classes in specific linguistic families
Algonquian languages
The
Ojibwe language and other members of the
Algonquian languages distinguish between animate and inanimate classes. Some sources argue that the distinction is between things which are powerful and things which are not. All living things, as well as sacred things and things connected to the Earth are considered powerful and belong to the "animate" class. Still, the assignment is somewhat arbitrary, as "raspberry" is animate, but "strawberry" is inanimate.
Athabaskan languages
In
Navajo language Navajo (
Southern Athabaskan) nouns are classified according to their animacy, shape, and consistency.
Morphology (linguistics) Morphologically, however, the distinctions are not expressed on the nouns themselves, but on the verbs of which the nouns are the subject or direct object. For example, in the sentence ''Shi’éé’ tsásk’eh bikáa’gi dah siłtsooz'' "My shirt is lying on the bed", the verb ''siłtsooz'' "lies" is used because the subject ''shi’éé’'' "my shirt" is a flat, flexible object. In the sentence ''Siziiz tsásk’eh bikáa’gi dah silá'' "My belt is lying on the bed", the verb ''silá'' "lies" is used because the subject ''siziiz'' "my belt" is a slender, flexible object. See
Navajo language#Classificatory Verbs for more discussion.
Koyukon (
Northern Athabaskan) has a more intricate system of classification. Like Navajo, it has classificatory verb stems that classify nouns according to animacy, shape, and consistency. However, in addition these verb stems, Koyukon verbs have what are called ''gender prefixes'' that further classify nouns. That is, Koyukon has two different systems that classify nouns: '''(a)''' a classificatory verb system and '''(b)''' a gender system. To illustrate, the verb stem ''-tonh'' is used for enclosed objects. When ''-tonh'' is combined with different gender prefixes, it can result in ''daaltonh'' which refers to objects enclosed in boxes or ''etltonh'' which refers to objects enclosed in bags.
Australian Aboriginal languages
The
Dyirbal language is well known for its system of four noun classes, which tend to be divided along the following semantic lines:
* I — animate objects, men
* II — women,
water,
fire,
violence
* III — edible
fruit and
vegetables
* IV — miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three)
The class usually labeled "feminine", for instance, includes the word for fire and nouns relating to fire, as well as all dangerous creatures and phenomena. This inspired the title of the
George Lakoff book ''Women, Fire and Dangerous Things'' (ISBN 0226468046).
The
Ngangikurrunggurr language has noun classes reserved for canines, and hunting weapons, and the
Anindilyakwa language has a noun class for things that reflect light. The
Diyari language distinguishes only between female and other objects. Perhaps the most noun classes in any Australian language are found in
Yanyuwa language Yanyuwa, which has 16 noun classes.
Caucasian languages
Of the
Caucasian languages, some members of the
Northwest Caucasian languages Northwest Caucasian family, and almost all of the
Northeast Caucasian languages, manifest noun class. In the Northeast Caucasian family, only
Lezgi language Lezgi,
Udi language Udi, and
Aghul language Aghul do not have noun classes. Some languages have only two classes, while the
Bats language has eight. The most widespread system, however, has four classes: male, female, animate beings and certain objects, and finally a class for the remaining nouns. The
Andi language has a noun class reserved for insects.
Among Northwest Caucasian languages,
Abkhaz language Abkhaz shows a human male/human female/non-human distinction.
Ubykh language Ubykh shows some inflections along the same lines, but only in some instances, and in some of these instances inflection for noun class is not even obligatory.
In all Caucasian languages that manifest class, it is not marked on the noun itself but on the dependent verbs, adjectives, pronouns and prepositions.
An entire [http://www.beautyinchaos.com/sex website] has been devoted to exploring the possibilities of inanimate genders in Caucasian languages.
Indo-European languages
In Indo-European languages, genders typically include '''feminine''', '''masculine''' and '''neuter'''.
Latin has these three, but in many of
Romance languages its modern descendants, such as
French language French and
Spanish language Spanish, the neuter gender has all but disappeared, though a few words, especially pronouns with no clear gender such as "cela" in French, have been assigned by some grammarians to a neuter gender. In Spanish, there exists a "neuter singular" gender whose only nouns are adjectives used as abstract nouns. (''eg'' "lo único" = "the only thing"; "lo mismo" = "the same thing").
Romanian language Romanian has preserved all three genders from
Latin, but the neuter gender is a combination of the other two, in the sense that neuter nouns in the singular behave like masculine nouns, while in the plural they behave like feminine nouns; as a consequence, adjectives, pronouns, and pronominal adjectives only have two forms, both in the singular and in the plural.
In other languages, feminine and masculine have merged into a '''common''' gender with a neuter gender, for example, in
Danish language Danish.
English language English generally exhibits gender only in third-person singular pronouns (as with '''he''', '''she''', and '''it'''), with the masculine and feminine genders used only for persons or higher animals, sometimes objects in colloquial speech as in 'Isn't she a beauty?'. Other languages may group genders differently:
Slavic languages further divide the masculine gender into '''animate''' and '''inanimate''' groups (the extent varies between individual languages, and some of them also apply the distinction in the feminine plural); The Spanish constructions for direct objects are different for humans and for objects, although its Latin-influenced grammar tradition doesn't usually count this as a noun class distinction; the
Nostratic language, a theoretical language that gave rise to the Indo-European languages and other language families, is believed by its proponents to have had '''human''', '''animal''', and '''object''' as grammatical genders.
In common nouns, grammatical gender is usually only peripherally related to sex. For example, in Spanish, the word '''hijo''' (son) is masculine and '''hija''' (daughter) is feminine, as one might expect. This is called '''
natural gender''', or sometimes '''logical gender'''. Other times, there are elaborate (and mostly incomplete) rules to define the gender of a word. For example, in
German language German, nouns ending in '''-ung''' (corresponding to '''-ing''' in English) are feminine, and car brand names are masculine. Words with the '''-lein''' and '''-chen''' ending (meaning little, young) are neuter, thus the grammatical genders of '''Mädchen''' (girl) and '''Fräulein''' (young woman) are neuter. In some local dialects of German, all nouns for female persons have been shifted to the neuter gender, but the female gender remains for some words denoting objects. All this is language-specific. In Latin, the word ''Sol'' (Sun) was masculine and the word ''Luna'' (Moon) was feminine (as in French, Spanish, Italian), but in German (and Germanic languages in general), the opposite occurs. The learner of a language thus must regard the gender as part of the noun, and memorize accordingly to use the language correctly. A frequent recommendation is to memorize the definite article and the noun as a unit.
In Indo-European languages that assign genders to all nouns, the genders often correspond roughly to
declensions that govern the way the nouns are inflected. In Latin, for example, almost all of the ''-a'' stem nouns of the first declension are feminine; the main exceptions are a handful of nouns that identify typically male roles like ''nauta'', "sailor," ''agricola'', "farmer," and ''poeta'', "poet". Likewise, almost all of the ''-o'' stem nouns of the second declension that end in ''-us'' in the
nominative noun case case are masculine; those ending in ''-um'' are neuter. Names of places and trees are feminine though, like ''ulmus'', "elm," or ''Ægyptus'', "Egypt." Most other Indo-European languages that have retained declensional systems have similar rules.
Niger-Congo languages
= Bantu languages
=
According to
Carl Meinhof, the
Bantu languages have a total of 22
noun class noun classes. While no single language is known to express all of them, all of them have at least 10 noun classes. For example, by Meinhof's numbering,
Swahili language#Noun classes Swahili has 15 classes, and
Sesotho language#Noun prefix system Sesotho has 18. However, Meinhof's numbering system counts singular and plural numbers of the same noun as belonging to separate classes (see
Sesotho language for examples). This is inconsistent with the way other languages are traditionally considered, where number is orthogonal to gender (a Meinhof-style analysis would give
Ancient Greek 9 genders!). If one follows broader linguistic tradition and counts singular and plural as belonging to the same class, then Swahili has 8 or 9 noun classes and Sesotho has 11.
Often, certain noun classes are reserved for humans. The
Fula language has a noun class reserved for liquids. According to
Steven Pinker, the
Kivunjo language has 16 genders including classes for precise locations and for general locales, classes for clusters or pairs of objects and classes for the objects that come in pairs or clusters, and classes for abstract qualities.
= Zande language Zande
=
The Zande language distinguishes four noun classes:
{| class="wikitable"
!Criterion!!Example!!Translation
|-
|human (male)||kumba||man
|-
|human (female)||dia||wife
|-
|animate||nya||beast
|-
|other||bambu||house
|}
There are about 80 inanimate nouns which are in the animate class, including nouns denoting heavenly objects (moon, rainbow), metal objects (hammer, ring), edible plants (sweet potato, pea), and non-metallic objects (whistle, ball). Many of the exceptions have a round shape, and some can be explained by the role they play in Zande mythology.
= Other
=
The Alamblak language classifies objects based on their shape: oblong objects and animals are named using masculine nouns, round objects using feminine nouns.
Noun classes in specific languages
{{col-begin}}
{{col-2}}
List of languages without grammatical genders/noun classes
{{dynamic list}}
*
Afrikaans language Afrikaans
*
Armenian language Armenian
*
Basque language Basque
*
Bengali language Bengali
*
Bislama
*
Bugis language Bugis
*
Burmese language Burmese
*
Cebuano language Cebuano
*
Central Yup'ik language Central Yup'ik
*
Chinese language Chinese
*
Chol language Chol
*
English language English English has a vestigial natural gender system (on pronouns) but no grammatical gender.
*
Estonian language Estonian
*
Esperanto language Esperanto Esperanto has, however, gender-marked third-person pronouns and a feminine marker suffix.
*
Finnish language Finnish
*
Georgian language Georgian
*
Guaranà language GuaranÃ
*
Hawaiian language Hawaiian
*
Hungarian language Hungarian
*
Ido language Ido Ido has the masculine infix '''-ul''' and the feminine infix '''-in''' for animate beings. Both are optional and are used only if it is necessary to avoid the ambiguity. Thus, '''kato''': ''a cat'', '''katulo''': ''a tom-cat'', '''katino''': ''a she-cat''. Besides, there are third person singular and plural pronouns for all three genders: '''masculine''', '''feminine''', and '''neuter''', in addition to ''gender-free'' pronouns.
*
Ilocano language Ilocano
*
Indonesian language Indonesian
*
Interlingua language Interlingua
*
Japanese language Japanese
*
Kannada language Kannada
*
Khmer language Khmer
*
Korean language Korean
*
Lao language Lao
*
Lojban language Lojban
*
Malagasy language Malagasy
*
Malay language Malay
*
Malayalam language Malayalam
*
Makasar language Makasar
*
Mandar language Mandar
*
Papiamento language Papiamentu
*
Persian language Persian
*
Nahuatl language Nahuatl
*
Pirahã language Pirahã
*
Quechua language Quechua
*
Quenya
*
Sindarin
*
Sinhala language Sinhala
*
Sami languages
*
Tagalog language Tagalog
*
Telugu language Telugu
*
Tlingit language Tlingit
*
Thai language Thai
*
Tok Pisin
*
Toki Pona language Toki Pona
*
Tulu language Tulu
*
Turkish language Turkish
*
Tzotzil language Tzotzil
*
Tzeltal language Tzeltal
*
Vietnamese language Vietnamese
*
Yoruba language Yoruba
{{col-2}}
List of languages with grammatical genders/noun classes
{{dynamic list}}
*
Albanian language Albanian
*
Egyptian language Ancient Egyptian
*
Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek
*
Akkadian language Akkadian
*
Arabic language Arabic
*
Aramaic language Aramaic
*
Bosnian language Bosnian
*
Bulgarian language Bulgarian
*
Catalan language Catalan
*
Coptic language Coptic
*
Cornish language Cornish
*
Croatian language Croatian
*
Czech language Czech
*
Danish language Danish
*
Dari language Dari-Persian
*
Dutch language Dutch
*
Faroese language Faroese
*
French language French
*
German language German
*
Greek language Greek
*
Gujarati language Gujarati
*
Hebrew language Hebrew
*
Hindi language Hindi
*
Icelandic language Icelandic
*
Irish language Irish
*
Italian language Italian
*
Klingon language Klingon
*
Latin
*
Latvian language Latvian
*
Lithuanian language Lithuanian
*
Marathi language Marathi
*
Manx language Manx
*
Norwegian language Norwegian
*
Occitan language Occitan
*
Old English language Old English
*
Old Prussian language Old Prussian
*
Pashto language Pashto
*
Polish language Polish
*
Portuguese language Portuguese
*
Punjabi language Punjabi
*
Romanian language Romanian
*
Russian language Russian
*
Sanskrit language Sanskrit
*
Scottish Gaelic language Scottish Gaelic
*
Serbian language Serbian
*
Slovak language Slovak
*
Slovenian language Slovenian
*
Sorbian language Sorbian
*
Spanish language Spanish
*
Sumerian language Sumerian
*
Swahili language Swahili
*
Swedish language Swedish
*
Berber languages Tamazight (Berber)
*
Tajik language Tajiki Persian
*
Ukrainian language Ukrainian
*
Urdu language Urdu
*
Welsh language Welsh
*
Yiddish language Yiddish
{{col-end}}
{{col-begin}}
{{col-2}}
Two genders/noun classes
=Masculine and feminine
=
*
Akkadian language Akkadian
*
Egyptian language Ancient Egyptian
*
Arabic language Arabic
*
Aramaic language Aramaic
*
Bengali language Bengali
*
Catalan language Catalan
*
Coptic language Coptic
*
French language French
*
Hebrew language Hebrew
*
Hindi language Hindi
*
Irish language Irish
*
Italian language Italian
*
Latvian language Latvian
*
Lithuanian language Lithuanian
*
Occitan language Occitan
*
Punjabi language Punjabi
*
Portuguese language Portuguese
*
Scottish Gaelic language Scottish Gaelic
*
Spanish language Spanish
*
Berber languages Tamazight (Berber)
*
Urdu language Urdu
*
Welsh language Welsh
=Common and neuter
=
*
Danish language Danish
*
Dutch language Dutch (''masculine'' and ''feminine'' have merged; however, a difference is still made, the extent of which depending on dialect. See the
Dutch grammar#Nouns section on nouns in the article on
Dutch grammar).
*
Hittite language Hittite
*
Low German
*
Norwegian language Norwegian (''Riksmål'')
*
Swedish language Swedish
=Animate and inanimate
=
*
Sumerian language Sumerian
*Many Native American languages, such as
Navajo language Navajo
*Polish and Russian
{{col-2}}
Three grammatical genders/noun classes
=Masculine, feminine, and neuter
=
*
Albanian language Albanian (''neuter'' has almost disappeared)
*
Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek
*
Belarusian
*
Bosnian language Bosnian
*
Bulgarian language Bulgarian
*
Croatian language Croatian
*
Czech language Czech
*
Dutch language Dutch (''masculine'' and ''feminine'' have merged; however, a difference is still made, the extent of which depends on dialect. See the
Dutch grammar#Nouns section on nouns in the article on
Dutch grammar).
*
Faroese language Faroese
*
German language German
*
Greek language Greek
*
Gujarati language Gujarati
*
Icelandic language Icelandic
*
Latin
*
Marathi language Marathi
*
Norwegian language Norwegian
*
Old English language Old English
*
Old Prussian language Old Prussian
*
Polish language Polish
*
Romanian language Romanian
*
Russian language Russian
*
Sanskrit language Sanskrit
*
Serbian language Serbian
*
Slovak language Slovak
*
Slovenian language Slovenian
*
Sorbian language Sorbian
*
Tamil language Tamil (there is also a 4th gender, equivalent of "Sir" in English, used for teachers, and higher officials, to speak with respect)
*
Ukrainian language Ukrainian
*
Yiddish language Yiddish
=Three genders, other classifications
=
*
Klingon language Klingon (being capable of speaking, body part and other)
{{col-end}}
More than three grammatical genders/noun classes
{{col-begin}}
{{col-2}}
*
Swahili language Swahili
*
Zulu language Zulu
*
Dyirbal language Dyirbal
*
Bats language Bats
*all
Bantu languages
*some
Slavic languages, including Russian and Czech, make certain grammatical distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns, but only in the masculine gender.
*
Polish language Polish distinguishes singular masculine animated versus inanimated nouns and plural masculine human vs. non-human nouns
*
Swedish language Swedish distinguishes masculine (han), feminine (hon), neuter (det) and non-masculine non-feminine non-neuter (den)
{{col-2}}
=More than three noun classes counting measure words
=
*
Ainu language Ainu
*
Bengali language Bangla (Bengali)
*
Chinese language Chinese
*
Japanese language Japanese
*
Korean language Korean
*
Thai language Thai
{{col-end}}
Bibliography
* Craig, Colette G. (1986). ''Noun classes and categorization: Proceedings of a symposium on categorization and noun classification, Eugene, Oregon, October 1983''. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins.
* Corbett, Greville G. (1991) ''Gender'', Cambridge University Press —A comprehensive study; looks at 200 languages.
* Corbett, Geville (1994) "Gender and gender systems". En R. Asher (ed.) ''The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics'', Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp. 1347--1353.
* Greenberg, J. H. (1978) "How does a language acquire gender markers?". En J. H. Greenberg et al. (eds.) ''Universals of Human Language'', Vol. 4, pp. 47--82.
* Hockett, Charles F. (1958) ''A Course in Modern Linguistics'', Macmillan.
* Ibrahim, M. (1973) ''Grammatical gender. Its origin and development''. La Haya: Mouton.
* Iturrioz, J. L. (1986) "Structure, meaning and function: a functional analysis of gender and other classificatory techniques". ''Función'' 1. 1-3.
* Meissner, Antje & Anne Storch (eds.) (2000) ''Nominal classification in African languages'', Institut für Afrikanische Sprachwissenschaften, Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. ISBN 3-89645-014-X.
*
Steven Pinker Pinker, Steven (1994) ''
The Language Instinct'', William Morrow and Company.
Category:Grammar
als:Genus
ca:Gènere (gramà tica)
da:Grammatisk køn
de:Genus
es:Género gramatical
eo:Genro
fr:Genre grammatical
gl:Xénero (gramática)
it:Genere (linguistica)
la:Genus verborum
nl:Geslacht (taalkunde)
ja:性 (文法)
nn:Genus
pl:Rodzaj gramatyczny
pt:Gênero gramatical
ru:Род (грамматика)
fi:Genus
sv:Grammatiskt genus
zh:性
*** Shopping-Tip: Grammatical gender
