common

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 and inanimate.

Depending on the language and the specific word, the assignment of grammatical gender may correlate with the noun's meaning (e.g., "woman" is typically feminine) or may be entirely arbitrary.

In a few languages, the assignment of any particular noun (i.e., nominal lexeme, that set of noun forms inflectable from a common lemma) to one grammatical gender is solely determined by that noun's meaning, or attributes, like gender identity, 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 or inanimacy, "humanness" or non-humanness, and gender identity.

However, in most languages, this semantic 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 "la masculinité" and "la virilité". In such a case, the gender assignment can also be influenced by the morphology or phonology of the noun, or in some cases can be apparently arbitrary.

Usually each noun is assigned 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.

Functions

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 homophones.

In literature, gender can be used to "animate and personify inanimate nouns". 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, in cases where the objects in question have different grammatical gender, gender distinction prevents such ambiguity. The word for "flowerbed" (Blumenbeet) is neuter, whereas that for "garden" (Garten) 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.

Moreover, grammatical gender may serve to distinguish homophones. It is a quite common phenomenon in language development for two phonemes 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 ("pot") and peau ("skin") are homophones /po/, but disagree in gender: le pot vs. la peau.

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

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 gender, or do not specify the gender 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 Baltic languages, the Celtic languages, some Indo-Aryan languages (e.g., Hindustani), and the Afroasiatic languages.

This is similar to systems with a masculine–feminine contrast, except that there is a third available gender, so nouns with gender-less or unspecified-gender referents may be either masculine, feminine, or neuter. There are also certain exceptional nouns whose gender does not follow the denoted gender, such as the German Mädchen, meaning "girl", which is neuter. This is because it is actually a diminutive of Magd and all diminutive forms with the suffix -chen are neuter. Examples of languages with such a system include later forms of Proto-Indo-European (see below), Sanskrit, some Germanic languages, most Slavic languages, a few Romance languages (Romanian, Asturian and Neapolitan), Marathi, Latin, and Greek (Modern and Ancient).

Here nouns that denote animate 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 (see below). Modern examples include Algonquian languages such as Ojibwe.

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 and Swedish (see Gender in Danish and Swedish), and to some extent Dutch (see Gender in Dutch grammar).

How gender contrasts can influence cognition

It has been shown that grammatical 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", but 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, the semantic differential, 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, f.) more often used the words 'beautiful', 'elegant', 'pretty', and 'slender', while Spanish speakers, whose word for 'bridge' is masculine (puente, m.), used 'big', 'dangerous', 'strong', and 'sturdy' more often. However, studies of this kind have been criticized on various grounds and yield an unclear pattern of results overall.

Related linguistic concepts

A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, 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 the term noun class when none of the inflections in a language relate to gender, such as when an animate–inanimate distinction is made. However, the word gender derives from Latin genus (also the root of genre) which originally meant 'kind, type', so it does not necessarily have a meaning that relates to gender.

A classifier, or measure word, is a word or morpheme used in some languages together with a noun, principally to enable numbers and certain other determiners 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, 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 handshapes) can be found in sign languages.

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 Chinese classifier 个 (個) gè is frequently used as an alternative to various more specific classifiers.

Manifestation

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.

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).

Grammatical gender manifests itself when words related to a noun like determiners, pronouns or adjectives change their form (inflect) according to the gender of noun they refer to (agreement). The parts of speech 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 or case. In some languages the declension 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 and case. For example, a language like Latin, German or Russian 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.) A concrete example is provided by the German word See, which has two possible genders: when it is masculine (meaning "lake") its genitive singular form is Sees, but when it is feminine (meaning "sea"), the genitive is See, because feminine nouns do not take the genitive -s.

Gender is sometimes reflected in other ways. In Welsh, gender marking is mostly lost on nouns; however, Welsh has initial mutation, 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 merch "girl" changes into ferch after the definite article. This only occurs with feminine singular nouns: mab "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.)

Agreement, or concord, is a grammatical process in which certain words change their form so that values of certain grammatical categories 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.

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.

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 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, 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: uḥibbuka (أُحِبُّكَ)

"I love you", said to a female: uḥibbuki (أُحِبُّكِ)

Not all languages have gendered pronouns. In languages that never had grammatical gender, there is normally just one word for "he" and "she", like dia in Malay and Indonesian, ő in Hungarian and o in Turkish. These languages might only have different pronouns and inflections in the third person to differentiate between people and inanimate objects, but even this distinction is often absent. In written Finnish, for example, hän is used for "he" and "she" and se for "it", but in the colloquial language se is usually used for "he" and "she" as well. (For more on these different types of pronoun, see Third-person pronoun.)

Issues may arise in languages with gender-specific pronouns in cases when the gender of the referent is unknown or not specified; this is a matter that arises frequently in relation to gender-neutral language, as with English usage of 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 je, regardless of who is speaking; but this word becomes feminine or masculine depending on the gender of the speaker, as may be reflected through adjective agreement: je suis forte ('I am strong', spoken/written by a female); je suis fort (the same but by a male).

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 does not need to.

This usually means masculine or feminine, depending on the referent's gender. For example, in Spanish, mujer ("woman") is feminine whereas hombre ("man") is masculine; these attributions occur solely due to the semantically inherent gender character of each noun.

The grammatical gender of a noun does not always coincide with its natural gender. An example of this is the German word Mädchen ("girl"); this is derived from Magd ("maiden"), umlauted to Mäd- with the diminutive suffix -chen, and this suffix always makes the noun grammatically neuter. Hence the grammatical gender of Mädchen is neuter, although its natural gender is feminine (because it refers to a female person).

Other examples include:

Old English wīf (neuter) and wīfmann (masculine), meaning "woman"

German Weib (neuter), meaning "woman" (the word is now pejorative and generally replaced with die Frau, originally 'lady', feminine of obsolete der Fro, meaning 'lord')

Irish cailín (masculine) meaning "girl", and stail (feminine) meaning "stallion"

Portuguese mulherão (masculine), meaning "voluptuous woman"

Scottish Gaelic boireannach (masculine), meaning "woman"

Slovenian dekle (neuter), meaning "girl"

Polish babsztyl (masculine), meaning "unpleasant (usually old and ugly) woman"

Syntactic structure

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)

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 gender) 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 and Spanish, nouns that end in -o are mostly masculine, whereas those that end in -a are mostly feminine, regardless of their meaning. Nouns that end in some other vowel or a consonant are assigned a gender either according to etymology, by analogy, or by some other convention. These rules may override semantics in some cases: for example, the noun membro/miembro ("member") is always masculine, even when it refers to a girl or a woman, and pessoa/persona ("person") is always feminine, even when it refers to a boy or a man, a kind of form-meaning mismatch.

In other cases, meaning takes precedence: the noun comunista "communist" is masculine when it refers or could refer to a man, even though it ends with -a. Nouns in Spanish and Portuguese, as in the other Romance languages 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: problema ("problem") is masculine in Spanish because it was derived from a Greek noun of the neuter gender, whereas foto ("photo") and radio ("broadcast signal") are feminine because they are clippings of fotografía and radiodifusión respectively, both grammatically feminine nouns.

Most Spanish nouns in -ión are feminine. They derive from Latin feminines in -ō, accusative -iōnem. The opposite is correct with Northern Kurdish language or Kurmanci. For example, the words endam (member) and heval (friend) can be masculine or feminine according to the person they refer to.

Keça wî hevala min e. (His daughter is my friend)

Kurrê wî hevalê min e. (His son is my friend)

Suffixes often carry a specific gender. For example, in German, diminutives with the suffixes -chen and -lein, meaning 'little, young', are always neuter, even if they refer to people, as with Mädchen 'girl' and Fräulein 'young woman' (see below). When the suffix -ling is used to convert uncountable nouns to countable nouns (Teig 'dough' → Teigling 'piece of dough'), abstract nouns to personal nouns (Strafe 'punishment' → Sträfling 'convict'), or adjectives into nouns (feige 'cowardly' → Feigling 'coward'), the result is always masculine. Similarly, the suffixes -heit and -keit (comparable with -hood and -ness in English) produce feminine nouns.

Meaning-based semantic criteria

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

In some languages, the gender of a noun is directly determined by its physical attributes (gender, animacy, etc.), and there are few or no exceptions to this rule. There are relatively few such languages. The Dravidian languages use this system as described below.

Another example is the Dizi language, which has two asymmetrical genders. The feminine includes all female living beings and diminutives; 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) are very similar in this respect, although the English gendered pronouns (he, she) are used for domestic animals if the gender of the animal is known, and sometimes for certain objects such as ships, e.g. "What happened to the Titanic? She (or it) sank."

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-gender-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.

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. (This is reflected in dictionaries, which typically indicate the gender of noun headwords where applicable.)

Second-language learners are often encouraged to memorize a modifier, usually a definite article, in conjunction with each noun—for example, a learner of French may learn the word for "chair" as la chaise (meaning "the chair"); this carries the information that the noun is chaise, and that it is feminine (because la 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 crosscut number contrasts, such that the singular form of a noun has one gender, and plural form of the noun has a different gender.

Meaningful

Gender shift may be associated with a difference in the gender of the referent, as with nouns such as comunista 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 See meaning "lake" is masculine, whereas the identical word meaning "sea" is feminine. The meanings of the Norwegian noun ting have diverged further: masculine en ting is "a thing", whereas neuter et ting is "an assembly". (The parliament is the Storting, "the Great Ting"; the other tings like Borgarting are the regional courts.)

It is a matter of analysis how to draw the line between a single polysemous word with multiple genders and a set of homonyms with one gender each. For example, Bulgarian has a pair of homonyms пръст (prəst) which are etymologically unrelated. One is masculine and means "finger"; the other is feminine and means "soil".

Meaningless

In other cases, a word may be usable in multiple genders indifferently. For example, in Bulgarian the word пу̀стош, (pustosh, "wilderness") may be either masculine (definite form пу̀стоша, pustoshə) or feminine (definite form пустошта̀, pustoshta) 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 and Norwegian Bokmål 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: En sol, solen, soler, solene, or feminine: Ei sol, sola, soler, solene, in Norwegian Bokmål. The same goes for a lot of common words like bok (book), dukke (doll), bøtte (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, the word for "girl" is declined: En jente, jenta, jenter, jentene.

Associated with number contrasts

Sometimes a noun's gender can change between its plural and singular forms, as with the French words amour ("love"), délice ("delight") and orgue ("organ" as musical instrument), all of which are masculine in the singular but feminine in the plural. These anomalies may have a historical explanation (amour used to be feminine in the singular too) or result from slightly different notions (orgue in the singular is usually a barrel organ, whereas the plural orgues usually refers to the collection of columns in a church organ). Further examples are the Italian words uovo ("egg") and braccio ("arm"). These are masculine in the singular, but form the irregular plurals uova and braccia, which have the endings of the feminine singular, but have feminine plural agreement. (This is related to the forms of the second declension Latin neuter nouns from which they derive: ovum and bracchium, with nominative plurals ova and bracchia.) In other cases, the anomaly can be explained by the form of the noun, as is the case in Scottish Gaelic. 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. balach beag ("small boy"), but balaich bheaga ("small boys"), with the adjective showing agreement for both feminine gender (lenition of initial consonant) and plural number (suffixed -a).

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 gender-less 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 table; masculine, as with German Tisch; or neuter, as with Norwegian bord. (Even within a given language, nouns that denote the same concept may differ in gender—for example, of three German words for "car", Wagen is masculine whereas Auto is neuter, and Karre is feminine.)

Cognate 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 words for "sun" are masculine, being derived from the Latin masculine noun sol, whereas the words for "moon" are feminine, being derived from the Latin feminine luna. (This contrasts with the genders found in German, where Sonne "sun" is feminine, and Mond "moon" is masculine, as well as in other Germanic languages.) However, there are exceptions to this principle. For instance, latte ("milk") is masculine in Italian (as are French lait and Portuguese leite), whereas Spanish leche is feminine and Romanian lapte is neuter. Likewise, the word for "boat" is neuter in German (das Boot), but common gender in Swedish (en båt).

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 луна ("moon") is feminine, whereas месяц ("crescent moon", also meaning "month") is masculine. In Polish, another Slavic language, the word for moon is księżyc, which is masculine.

Russian also has two words for "potato": картофель which is masculine, and картошка which is feminine.

In Polish the loanword tramwaj ("tram") is masculine, whereas the cognate loanword in Czech, tramvaj, is feminine.

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.

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, 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 bagga "bag" was induced by the feminine gender of the Italian word borsa "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 виски (viski) "whisky" was originally feminine, then masculine, and today it has become neuter.

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 quarter of them had grammatical gender. WALS found that, of the 256 languages studied from around the world, gender was used in approximately half.

Gender systems rarely overlap with numerical classifier systems. Gender and noun class systems are usually found in fusional or agglutinating languages, whereas classifiers are more typical of isolating languages. Thus, according to Johanna Nichols, 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-marking morphology;

moderate to high morphological complexity;

non-accusative alignment.

Grammatical gender is found in many Indo-European languages (including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian, and German—but not English, Bengali, Armenian or Persian, for example), Afroasiatic languages (which includes the Semitic and Berber languages, etc.), and in other language families such as Dravidian (including Tamil but not Malayalam, for example) and Northeast Caucasian (Chechen but not Lezgian, for example), as well as several Australian Aboriginal languages such as Dyirbal, and Kalaw Lagaw Ya. Most Niger–Congo languages also have extensive systems of noun classes, which can be grouped into several grammatical genders.

Conversely, grammatical gender is usually absent from the Koreanic, Japonic, Tungusic, Turkic, Mongolic, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, Uralic 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 which is one of the central elements of grammatical gender in most other Indo-European languages.

Indo-European

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

Research indicates that the earliest stages of Proto-Indo-European 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. 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, Latin, Sanskrit, Ancient and Modern Greek, German, Icelandic, Romanian and Asturian (two Romance language exceptions). In them, there is a high but not absolute correlation between grammatical gender and declensional 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 as in Vulgar Latin then most Romance languages; a few traces of the Latin neuter remain, such as the distinct Spanish pronoun ello and Italian nouns with so-called "mobile gender". Hindustani and the Celtic languages also dropped neuter. Others merged feminine and masculine into a common gender but retained the neuter, as in Swedish and Danish, and to some extent in Dutch. Finally, some languages, such as English and Afrikaans, have nearly completely lost grammatical gender (retaining only some traces, such as the English pronouns he, she, they, and it—Afrikaans hy, sy, hulle, and dit); Armenian, Bengali, Persian, Sorani Kurdish, Ossetic, Odia, Khowar, and Kalasha-mun have lost it entirely.

On the other hand, some Slavic languages can be argued to have added new genders to the classical three (see below).

Although 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 and reflected essentially in pronouns only.

Dravidian

In Tamil and some other Dravidian languages, 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 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 nouns.

Austronesian

In the Austronesian Wuvulu-Aua language, vocative words used when addressing a relative often specify the speaker's gender. For example, tafi means 'sister of female', ʔari means opposite-gender sibling, and wane means female's father's sister or female's brother's daughter.