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In Linguistics , grammatical genders, sometimes also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once.Hockett, Charles F. (1958) ''A Course in Modern Linguistics'', Macmillan, p. 231. SIL: Glossary of Linguistic Terms: What is grammatical gender? If a language distinguishes between masculine and feminine gender, for instance, then each noun belongs to one of those two genders; in order to correctly Decline any noun and any Modifier or other type of word affecting that noun, one must identify whether the noun is feminine or masculine. The term "grammatical gender" is mostly used for Indo-European Languages , many of which follow the pattern just described. Modern English , however, is normally described as lacking grammatical gender.1 The linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and social notion of Natural Gender , although they interact closely in many languages. Both grammatical and natural gender can have linguistic effects in a given language. Although some authors use the term " Noun Class " as a synonym or an extension of "grammatical gender", for others they are separate concepts. OVERVIEW Many languages place each noun into one of three gender classes (or simply "genders"):
For example, in their Nominative singular forms Polish nouns are typically feminine if they have the Ending ''-a'', neuter when they end with ''-o'', ''-e'', or ''-ę'', and masculine if they have no gender suffix ( Null Morpheme ). Thus, ''encyklopedia'' "encyclopaedia" is feminine, ''krzesło'' "chair" is neuter, and ''ręcznik'' "towel" is masculine. When the adjective ''duży'' "big" is combined with these nouns in Phrase s, it changes form according to their grammatical gender: As can be seen, the neuter gender does not include all nouns that correspond to genderless realities. Some of these may be designated by nouns that are grammatically masculine or feminine. Also, some nouns that refer to males or females may have a different grammatical gender. In general, the boundaries of noun classes are rather arbitrary, although there are rules of thumb in many languages. In this context, the terms "masculine", "feminine" and "neuter" should be understood merely as convenient labels. They are suggestive class descriptors, but not every member of a class is well described by its label. Gender marking is not substantial in modern English. However, distinctions in personal pronouns have been inherited from Old English which can be used to give a flavour of how grammatical gender works. : John insisted that he would pay for his own dinner. : Jane insisted that she would pay for her own dinner. Here, the gender of the subject is marked both on the personal pronouns (''he/she'') and on the possessive adjectives (''his/her''). Marking of gender on the possessive form can be considered Redundant in these examples, since ''his own'' and ''her own'' must refer to their respective Antecedent s, ''he'' and ''she'', which are already unambiguously marked for gender. A full system of grammatical gender involves two phenomena: # Inflection: Many words have different forms for different genders, and certain Morphological Markers are characteristic of each gender. # Agreement: Every noun is associated with one gender class. In a phrase or clause, words that refer to a given noun Inflect to match the gender of that noun. Note that some words, called Epicene , may have identical forms for different genders. For example, in Spanish ''estudiante'' "student" and ''grande'' "big" can be masculine or feminine. Spanish is also an example of a language with only two genders, masculine and feminine; it has no neuter noun class. Nouns that designate entities with no natural gender, such as objects or abstractions, are distributed among the masculine and the feminine. In a few other languages, notably Germanic languages like Swedish , the former masculine and feminine genders have become indistinguishable with time, merging into a new class called the common gender, which however remains distinct from the neuter gender.van Berkum, J.J.A. (1996) ''The psycholinguistics of grammatical gender: Studies in language comprehension and production.'' Doctoral Dissertation, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Nijmegen, Netherlands: Nijmegen University Press (ISBN 90-373-0321-8), Chapter 2, '' "The linguistics of gender" (PDF).
Other languages still, like English , are regarded as not having grammatical gender, since they do not make gender distinctions through inflection, and do not generally require gender agreement between related words. Some authors have extended the concept of "grammatical gender" to the expression of other types of natural, individual characteristics through inflection, such as Animacy . See the section on gender across languages, below. Grammatical gender (with masculine and/or feminine categories) is commonly found in Afro-Asiatic , Dravidian , Indo-European , Northeast Caucasian , and several Australian Aboriginal Languages . It is mostly absent in the Altaic , Austronesian , Sino-Tibetan , and Uralic language families. The Niger-Congo Languages typically have an extensive system of Noun Class es, which some authors regard as a type of grammatical gender, but others describe as something completely different. GENDER INFLECTION In many languages, gender is marked quite profusely, surfacing in contexts where an English speaker might not expect it. :"I love you" in Arabic: :: said to a male: ''uħibbuka'' (أُحِبُّكََ) :: said to a female: ''uħibbuki'' (أُحِبُّكِ) :"Thank you very much" in Portuguese: :: said by a male: ''muito obrigado'' :: said by a female: ''muito obrigada'' The switch from one gender to the other is typically achieved by inflecting appropriate words, the object suffix of the verb ''uħibbu-ka/ki'' in the example. In Spanish, most masculine nouns and modifiers end with the suffix ''-o'' or with a consonant, while the suffix ''-a'' is characteristic of feminine nouns (though there are exceptions). Thus, ''niño'' means “boy”, and ''niña'' means “girl”. This paradigm is regularly exploited for making Neologism s: from the masculine nouns ''abogado'' "lawyer", ''diputado'' "member of parliament" and ''doctor'' "doctor", it was straightforward to make the feminine equivalents ''abogada'', ''diputada'', and ''doctora''. Sometimes, gender is expressed in more subtle ways. On the whole, gender marking has been lost in Welsh , both on the noun, and, often, on the adjective. However, it has the peculiar feature of Initial Mutation , where the first consonant of a word changes into another in certain syntactical conditions. Gender is one of the factors that can cause mutation, especially the so-called soft mutation. For instance, the word ''merch'', which means girl or daughter, changes into ''ferch'' after the definite article. This only occurs with feminine nouns; for example, ''mab'' "son" remains unchanged after the definite article. Adjectives are affected by gender in a similar way. Personal names See Also: Personal name Personal names are frequently constructed with language-specific affixes that identify the gender of the bearer. Common feminine suffixes used in English names are ''-a'', of Latin or Romance origin (cf. ''Robert'' and ''Roberta'') and ''-e'', of French origin (cf. ''Justin'' and ''Justine''). Although gender inflections may be used to construct cognate nouns for people of opposite genders in languages that have grammatical gender, this alone does not constitute grammatical gender. Distinct names for men and women are also common in languages where gender is not grammatical. Personal pronouns See Also: Gender-specific pronoun Gender-neutral pronoun Personal Pronoun s often have different forms based on gender. Even though it has lost grammatical gender, English still distinguishes between "he" (generally applied to a male person), "she" (female person), and "it" (object, abstraction, or animal). But this also does not guarantee the existence of grammatical gender. Gendered pronouns and their corresponding inflections vary considerably across languages. In languages that never had grammatical gender, there is normally just one word for "he" and "she", like ''hän'' in Finnish and ''ő'' in Hungarian . These languages have different pronouns and inflections in the Third Person only to differentiate between people and inanimate objects (and even this distinction is commonly waived in spoken Finnish). Dummy pronouns In languages with only a masculine and a feminine gender, the default Dummy Pronoun is usually the masculine third person singular. For example, the French sentence for "It's raining" is ''Il pleut'', literally "He rains". There are some exceptions: the corresponding sentence in Welsh is ''Mae hi'n bwrw glaw'', literally "She's raining". GENDER AGREEMENT In the French sentences ''Il est un grand acteur'' "He is a great actor" and ''Elle est une grande actrice'' "She is a great actress", almost every word changes to match the gender of the subject. The noun ''acteur'' inflects by changing the masculine suffix ''-eur'' into the feminine suffix ''-rice'', the personal pronoun ''il'' "he" changes to ''elle'' "she", and the feminine suffix ''-e'' is added to the article (''un'' → ''une'') and to the adjective (''grand'' → ''grande''). Only the verb ''est'' "is" remains unchanged. Curzan illustrates gender agreement in Old English with the following “highly contrived” example: The word ''hire'' "her" refers to ''lind'' "shield". Since this noun was grammatically feminine, the adjectives ''brade'' "broad" and ''tilu'' "good", as well as the pronouns ''seo'' "the/that" and ''hire'' "her", which referred to ''lind'', must also appear in their feminine forms. Old English had three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, but gender inflections were greatly simplified by Sound Change s, and then completely lost (as well as Number inflections, to a lesser extent). In modern English, by contrast, the noun "shield" takes the neuter pronoun "it", since it designates a genderless object. In a sense, the neuter gender has grown to encompass most nouns, including many that were masculine or feminine in Old English. If one were to replace the phrase "broad shield" with "brave man" or "kind woman", the only change to the rest of the sentence would be in the pronoun at the end, which would become "him" or "her", respectively. GRAMMATICAL VS. NATURAL GENDER The grammatical gender of a word doesn't always coincide with real gender of its referent. An often cited example is the German word ''Mädchen'', which means "girl", but is treated grammatically as neuter. This is because it was constructed as the Diminutive of ''Magd'' (archaic nowadays), and the diminutive suffix ''-chen'' conventionally places nouns in the "neuter" noun class. A few more examples: : German ''die Frau'' (feminine) and ''das Weib'' (neuter) both mean "the woman". : Irish ''cailín'' "girl" is masculine, while ''stail'' "stallion" is feminine. Normally, such exceptions are a small minority. However, in some local dialects of German all nouns for female persons have shifted to the neuter gender (presumably further influenced by the standard word ''Weib''), but the feminine gender remains for some words denoting objects. Indeterminate gender In languages with a masculine and feminine gender (and possibly a neuter), the masculine is usually employed by default to refer to persons of unknown gender. This is still done sometimes in English, although an alternative is to use the Singular "they" . Another alternative is to use two nouns, as in the phrase "ladies and gentlemen" ( Hendiadys ). In the plural, the masculine is also employed by default to refer to a mixed group of people. Thus, in French the feminine pronoun ''elles'' always designates an all-female group of people, but the masculine pronoun ''ils'' may refer to a group of males, to a mixed group, or to a group of people of unknown genders. In English, this issue does not arise with pronouns, since there is only one plural third person pronoun, "they". However, a group of actors and actresses would still be described as a group of "actors". In all these cases, one says that the feminine gender is Semantically Marked , while the masculine gender is unmarked. Animals Often, the masculine/feminine classification is only followed carefully for human beings. For animals, the relation between real and grammatical gender tends to be more arbitrary. In Spanish, for instance, a cheetah is always ''un guepardo'' (masculine) and a zebra is always ''una cebra'' (feminine), regardless of their biological sex. If it becomes necessary to specify the sex of the animal, an adjective is added, as in ''un guepardo hembra'' (a female cheetah), or ''una cebra macho'' (a male zebra). Different names for the male and the female of a species are more frequent for common pets or farm animals, eg. English ''horse'' and ''mare'', Spanish ''vaca'' "cow" and ''toro'' "bull". Vegetables are typically grouped with inanimate objects. In English, individual speakers may prefer one gender or another for animals of unknown sex, depending on species — for instance, a tendency to refer more often to dogs as "he" and to cats as "she". Objects and abstractions Since all nouns must belong to some noun class, many end up with genders which are purely counterpart ''луна'' is feminine. The Russian word for the Sun ''Солнце'' (''Solntse'') is neither masculine nor feminine but neuter). Also, in Russian the word ''собака'' "dog" is feminine, but its Ukrainian counterpart (with the same spelling and almost identical pronunciation) is masculine. There is nothing inherent about the Moon or a potato which makes them objectively "male" or "female". In these cases, gender is quite independent of meaning, and a property of the nouns themselves, rather than of their referents. Sometimes the gender switches: Russian ''тополь'' (poplar) is now masculine, but less than 200 years ago (in writings of Lermontov ) it was feminine. The modern loanword ''виски'' (from whisky/whiskey) was originally feminine (in a translation of Jack London stories, 1915), then masculine (in a song of Alexander Vertinsky , 1920s or 1930s), and finally it is neuter (today the masculine variant is typically considered archaic, and feminine one is completely forgotten). GENDER ASSIGNMENT There are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders: according to logical or symbolic similarities in their meaning (semantic criterion), by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphology), or through an arbitrary convention (possibly rooted in the language's history). Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent. Semantics In 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 found in some languages even in the Indo-European family. Sometimes, semantics prevails over the formal assignment of grammatical gender (agreement ''in sensu''). In Latin, for example, ''nauta'' "sailor" is masculine, and ''nurus'' "daughter-in-law" is feminine, even though the endings -''a'' and -''us'' are normally associated with the feminine and the masculine, respectively. In Polish, the nouns ''mężczyzna'' "man" and ''książę'' "prince" are masculine, even though words with the ending ''-a'' are normally feminine and words that end with ''-ę'' are usually neuter. See also Synesis . Morphology In Spanish, grammatical gender is overwhelmingly determined by noun Morphology . Since nouns that refer to male persons usually end in ''-o'' or a consonant and nouns that refer to female persons usually end in ''-a'', most ''other'' nouns that end in ''-o'' or a consonant are also treated as masculine, and most nouns that end in ''-a'' are treated as feminine, whatever their meaning. (Nouns that end in some other vowel are assigned a gender either according to Etymology , by analogy, or by some other convention.) Morphology may in fact override meaning, in some cases. The noun ''miembro'' "member" is always masculine, even when it refers to a woman, but ''persona'' "person" is always feminine, even when it refers to a man. In German also, diminutives with the endings ''-chen'' and ''-lein'' (cognates of English ''-kin'' and ''-ling'' meaning little, young) are always neuter, which is why ''Mädchen'' "girl" and ''Fräulein'' "young woman" are neuter. Another ending, the nominalizing suffix ''-ling'', can be used to make Countable Nouns from Uncountable Nouns (''Teig'' "dough" → ''Teigling'' "piece of dough"), or personal nouns from abstract nouns (''Lehre'' "teaching", ''Strafe'' "punishment" → ''Lehrling'' "apprentice", ''Sträfling'' "convict") or adjectives (''feige'' "cowardly" → ''Feigling'' "coward"), always producing masculine nouns. On the other hand, the correlation between grammatical gender and morphology is usually not perfect: ''problema'' "problem" is masculine in Spanish (this is for etymological reasons), and ''radio'' "radio station" is feminine (because it is a shortening of ''estación de radio'', a phrase whose Head is the feminine noun ''estación''). Convention In some languages, gender markers have been so eroded by time that they are no longer recognizable, even to native speakers. Most German nouns give no morphological or semantic clue as to their gender. It must simply be memorized. The Conventional aspect of grammatical gender is also clear when one considers that there is nothing objective about a table which makes it feminine as French ''table'', masculine as German ''Tisch'', or neuter as Norwegian ''bord''. The learner of such languages should regard gender as an integral part of each noun. A frequent recommendation is to memorize a modifier along with the noun as a unit, usually a definite article, i.e. memorizing ''la table'' — where ''la'' is the French feminine singular definite article — ''der Tisch'' - where ''der'' is the German masculine singular nominative definite article — and ''bordet'' — where the suffix ''-et'' indicates the definite neuter singular in Norwegian. Whether a distant ancestor of French, German, Norwegian, and English had a semantic value for genders is of course a different matter. Some authors have speculated that archaic Proto-Indo-European had two noun classes with the semantic values of animate and inanimate. GENDER IN ENGLISH See Also: Gender in English While grammatical gender was a fully productive inflectional category in Old English , Modern English has a much less pervasive gender system, primarily based on natural gender. There are a few traces of gender marking in Modern English:
But these are insignificant features compared to a typical language with grammatical gender:
It is also noteworthy that, with few exceptions, the gender of an English pronoun coincides with the real gender of its referent, rather than with the grammatical gender of its Antecedent , frequently different from the former in languages with true grammatical gender. The choice between "he", "she" and "it" invariably comes down to whether they designate a human male, a human female, or something else. Some exceptions:
The absence of grammatical gender is unusual for an Indo-European Language , though common in other language families. GENDER ACROSS LANGUAGE FAMILIES Other types of gender classifications Some languages have gender-like noun classifications unrelated to gender identity. Particularly common are languages with animate and inanimate categories. The term "grammatical genders" is also used by extension in this case, although many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to sexuality. Note however that the word "gender" derives from Latin '' Genus '' (also the root of ''genre'') originally meant "kind", so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning. For further information, see Animacy . 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 Vegetable s : IV — miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three) The class usually labeled "feminine", for instance, includes the word for fire and nouns relating to fire, as well as all dangerous creatures and phenomena. This inspired the title of the George Lakoff book ''Women, Fire and Dangerous Things'' (ISBN 0-226-46804-6). The Ngangikurrunggurr Language has noun classes reserved for canines, and hunting weapons, and the Anindilyakwa Language has a noun class for things that reflect light. The Diyari Language distinguishes only between female and other objects. Perhaps the most noun classes in any Australian language are found in Yanyuwa , which has 16 noun classes. Caucasian languages Some members of the Northwest Caucasian family, and almost all of the Northeast Caucasian Languages , manifest noun class. In the Northeast Caucasian family, only Lezgi , Udi , and Aghul do not have noun classes. Some languages have only two classes, while the Bats Language has eight. The most widespread system, however, has four classes, for male, female, animate beings and certain objects, and finally a class for the remaining nouns. The Andi Language has a noun class reserved for insects. Among Northwest Caucasian languages, Abkhaz shows a masculine-feminine-neuter distinction. Ubykh shows some inflections along the same lines, but only in some instances, and in some of these instances inflection for noun class is not even obligatory. In all Caucasian languages that manifest class, it is not marked on the noun itself but on the dependent verbs, adjectives, pronouns and prepositions. Indo-European Many linguists think the earliest stages of s, classical Latin, Sanskrit , and Greek , for instance. Other Indo-European languages reduced the number of genders to two, either by losing the neuter (like most Romance languages and the Celtic Language s), or by having the feminine and the masculine merge with one another into a common gender (as has happened, or is in the process of happening, to several Germanic languages). Some, like English and Afrikaans , have all but lost grammatical gender. On the other hand, a few Slavic Languages have arguably added new genders to the classical three. Exceptionally for a Romance language, Romanian has preserved the three genders of Latin, although the neuter has been reduced to a combination of the other two, in the sense that neuter nouns have masculine endings in the singular, but feminine endings in the plural. As a consequence, adjectives, pronouns, and pronominal adjectives only have two forms, both in the singular and in the plural. The same happens in Italian , to a lesser extent. Moreover the Italian third-person singular pronouns have a "neuter" form to refer to inanimate subjects (''egli''/''ella'' vs. ''esso''/''essa''). Some Slavic languages, including Russian and Czech , make grammatical distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns (in Czech only in the masculine gender; in Russian only in masculine singular, but in the plural in all genders). Another example is Polish, which can be said to distinguish five genders: personal masculine (referring to male humans), animate non-personal masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter. Even in those languages where the original three genders have been mostly lost or reduced, there is sometimes a trace of them in some parts of speech. The Spanish neuter definite article ''lo'', for example, is used with nouns that denote abstractions, eg. ''lo único'' "the only thing"; ''lo mismo'' "the same thing". In Portuguese, a distinction is made between ''está todo molhado'' "he's all wet", ''está toda molhada'' "she's all wet", and ''está tudo molhado'' "it's all wet" (used for unspecified objects). In terms of agreement, however, these "neuter" words count as masculine: both Spanish ''lo mismo'' and Portuguese ''tudo'' take masculine adjectives. English modifiers do not generally inflect with gender. See , for further information. Niger-Congo languages The Zande Language distinguishes four noun classes: 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. AUXILIARY AND CONSTRUCTED LANGUAGES Many Constructed Language s have natural gender systems similar to that of English. Animate nouns can have distinct forms reflecting natural gender, and personal pronouns are selected according to natural gender. There is no gender agreement on modifiers. The first three languages below fall into this category.
See also . MALE AND FEMALE SPEECH Some natural languages have intricate systems of gender-specific Vocabulary , which are not the same as grammatical gender. The oldest recorded language is Sumerian . The Sumerians lived in what is now southern Iraq about 5,000 years ago. Sumerian women had a special language called Emesal, distinct from the main language, Emegir, spoken by both genders. The women's language had a distinct vocabulary, found in the records of religious rituals to be performed by women, also in the speech of goddesses in mythological texts.Examples of Sumerian texts are available at the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. For a significant period of time in the history of the ancient Languages Of India , after the formal language Sanskrit diverged from the popular language Prakrit , some texts recorded the speech of women in Prakrit, distinct from the Sanskrit of male speakers. National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh. More recently, Thai shows evidence of similar features, where women have vocabulary items used in common speech, but typically distinct ones to be used among themselves. Amazing Thailand: Thai Language. The indigenous Australian language Yanyula has separate dialects for men and women. There are 15 noun classes, including nouns associated with food, trees and abstractions, in addition to separate classes for men and masculine things, women and feminine things. In the men's dialect, the classes for men and for masculine things have simplified to a single class, marked the same way as the women's dialect marker reserved exclusively for men.Jean F Kirton. 'Yanyuwa, a dying language'. In Michael J Ray (ed.), ''Aboriginal language use in the Northern Territory: 5 reports''. Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Darwin: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1988, p. 1-18. In Japanese also, certain Synonym s are used by men and women with different frequency, or conveying different connotations. However, there is no systematic Inflection al relation between male and female words, nor any form of Agreement , and their literal meaning does not change with gender. See Gender Differences In Spoken Japanese , for further information. CLASSIFIERS Some languages, such as Japanese, Chinese and the Tai Languages , have elaborate systems of Particles which classify nouns based on shape and function, but are Free Morpheme s rather than affixes. Because the classes defined by these classifying words are not generally distinguished in other contexts, many if not most linguists take the view that they do not create grammatical genders. See Classifier , for further information LIST OF LANGUAGES BY TYPE OF GRAMMATICAL GENDERS Languages with two grammatical genders Masculine and feminine
Common and neuter Animate and inanimate
Languages with three grammatical genders Masculine, feminine, and neuter
More than three grammatical genders
No grammatical genders See . NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY
SEE ALSO Further examples of the presence and absence of grammatical gender
Related topics Similar linguistic notions Gender-inclusive language
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