Grammatical gender

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.] [ [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsGrammaticalGender.htm 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.Cite web |url= http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761564210_2/English_Language.html |title= English Language |accessdate=2007-05-09 |work= Encarta Encyclopedia | publisher = Microsoft |year= 1993–2007 |quote=The distinctions of grammatical gender in English were replaced by those of natural gender.]

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

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

Overview

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

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

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

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

Grammatical vs. natural gender

The grammatical gender of a word does not always coincide with real gender of its referent. An often cited example is the German word "Mädchen", which means "girl", but is treated grammatically as neuter. This is because it was constructed as the diminutive of "Magd" (archaic nowadays), and the diminutive suffix "-chen" conventionally places nouns in the "neuter" noun class. A few more examples:
*German "die Frau" (feminine) and "das Weib" (neuter) both mean "the woman".
*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 often used to refer to a mixed group of people. Thus, in French the feminine pronoun "elles" always designates an all-female group of people, but the masculine pronoun "ils" may refer to a group of males, to a mixed group, or to a group of people of unknown genders. In English, this issue does not arise with pronouns, since there is only one plural third person pronoun, "they". However, a group of actors and actresses would still be described as a group of "actors".

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

Animals

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

In English, 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". However, if the gender is unknown, when speaking of an animal, "it" is used.

Objects and abstractions

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

Several words ending in -aje in Spanish are masculine: viaje (travel), paisaje (landscape), coraje (courage). But their Portuguese translations are feminine: viagem, paisagem, coragem. Reversely, the Spanish word "nariz" (nose) is feminine, whereas the Portuguese word for "nose" is spelt identically, but it is masculine.

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

More examples:

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

See also , and .

Male and female speech

Some natural languages have intricate systems of gender-specific vocabulary, which are not the same as grammatical gender.
* The oldest recorded language is Sumerian. The Sumerians lived in what is now southern Iraq about 5,000 years ago. Sumerian women had a special language called "Emesal", distinct from the main language, "Emegir", which was spoken by both genders. The women's language had a distinct vocabulary, found in the records of religious rituals to be performed by women, also in the speech of goddesses in mythological texts. [Examples of Sumerian texts are available at the [http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk 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 Prakrit languages, some Sanskrit plays recorded the speech of women in Prakrit, distinct from the Sanskrit of male speakers. This convention was also used for illiterate and low-caste male speakers. [ [http://banglapedia.net/HT/P_0254.HTM 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. [ [http://www.amazing-thailand.com/Lang.html Amazing Thailand: Thai Language.] ]
* Garifuna has a vocabulary split between terms used only by men and terms used only by women. This does not however affect the entire vocabulary but when it does, the terms used by men generally come from Carib and those used by women come from Arawak.
* The indigenous Australian language Yanyula has separate dialects for men and women. [Jean F Kirton. [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_work.asp?id=21977 '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 synonyms are used by men and women with different frequency, or conveying different connotations. However, there is no systematic inflectional relation between male and female words, nor any form of agreement, and their literal meaning does not change with gender. See Gender differences in spoken Japanese for further information.

List of languages by type of grammatical genders

Masculine and feminine

*Albanian The "neuter" has almost disappeared.
*Akkadian
*Asturian
*Ancient Egyptian
*Amharic
*Arabic However, Arabic distinguishes masculine and feminine in the singular and the dual. In the plural it distinguishes between male humans, female humans and non-human plurals (including collectives of humans, such as "nation," "people," etc.), non-human plurals being feminine singular, no matter their gender in the singular.
*Aramaic
*Catalan
*Coptic
*Corsican
*French
*Galician
*Hebrew
*Hindi
*Irish"
*Italian There is a trace of the "neuter" in some nouns and personal pronouns.
*Latvian
*Lithuanian There is a "neuter" gender for adjectives with very limited usage and set of forms.
*Manchu Used vowel harmony in gender inflections.
*Occitan
*Portuguese There is a trace of the "neuter" in the demonstratives and some indefinite pronouns.
*Punjabi
*Sardinian
*Scottish Gaelic
*Sicilian
*Spanish There is a "neuter" of sorts, though generally expressed only with the definite article "lo", used with nouns denoting abstract categories: "lo bueno".
*Tamazight (Berber)
*Telugu
*Urdu
*Welsh

Common and neuter

*Danish
*Dutch The "masculine" and the "feminine" have merged into a "common gender" in standard Dutch, but a distinction is still made by many when using pronouns, and in some dialects: see gender in Dutch grammar.
*Low German
*Norwegian (Riksmål, and the dialect of Bergen)
*Swedish

Animate and inanimate

*Basque (two different paradigms of noun declension are used, although adjectives and demonstratives do not show gender)
*Elamite
*Hittite
*Many Native American languages, including most languages of the Algic, Siouan [http://www.latrobe.edu.au/rclt/StaffPages/aikhenvald%20downloads/ClassifiersELL2published.pdf] [Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, 1996. p.437] and Uto-Aztecan language families, as well as isolates such as Mapudungun
*Sumerian

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

Masculine, feminine, and neuter

*Belarusian
*Bengali
*Bosnian
*Bulgarian
*Croatian
*Dutch The "masculine" and the "feminine" have merged into a "common gender" in standard Dutch, but a distinction is still made by many when using pronouns, and in some dialects: see gender in Dutch grammar.
*Faroese
*Gaulish
*German
*Greek
*Gujarati
*Icelandic
*Kannada
*Latin
*Macedonian
*Marathi
*Norwegian The feminine gender is largely superfluous in Norwegian. Many dialects allow feminine nouns to be treated as masculine — i.e., given the corresponding masculine inflections. Some dialects do not use the feminine gender at all.
*Old English
*Old Irish
*Old Prussian
*Polish
*Romanian The neuter gender (called "neutru" or sometimes "ambigen" in Romanian) has no separate forms of its own; neuter nouns behave like masculine nouns in the singular, and feminine in the plural. This behavior is seen in the form of agreeing adjectives and replacing pronouns. See Romanian nouns.
*Russian
*Sanskrit
*Serbian
*Serbo-Croatian
*Slovak
*Slovenian
*Sorbian
*Swedish As in Dutch, the "masculine" and the "feminine" have merged into a "common gender" in standard Swedish. But some dialects, mainly in Dalecarlia, Ostrobothnia (Finland) and northern Sweden, have preserved three genders in spoken language.
*Ukrainian
*Yiddish
*Zazaki

More than three grammatical genders

*Czech: "Masculine animate", "Masculine inanimate", "Feminine", "Neuter".
*Dyirbal: "Masculine", "feminine", "vegetal" and "other". (Some linguists do not regard the noun class system of this language as grammatical gender.)
*Luganda: ten classes called simply "Class I" to "Class X" and containing all sorts of arbitrary groupings but often characterised as "people", "long objects", "animals", "miscellaneous objects", "large objects and liquids", "small objects", "languages", "pejoratives", "infinitives", "mass nouns"
*Polish: "Personal masculine", "animate masculine", "inanimate masculine", "feminine", and "neuter" (some approaches only recognize three genders).
*Tamil: Gender highly correlated with number – "Animate masculine singular", "Animate feminine singular", "Animate plural", "Inanimate singular" and "inanimate plural".
*Zande: "Masculine", "feminine", "animate", and "inanimate".

No grammatical genders

See .

ee also

Further examples of the presence and absence of grammatical gender

*Gender-neutrality in languages with grammatical gender
*Gender-neutrality in languages without grammatical gender
*Gender-neutral pronoun

Related topics

*Agreement (grammar)
*Animacy
*Declension
*Gender
*Inflection
*Morphology (linguistics)

imilar linguistic notions

*Grammatical conjugation
*Grammatical number
*Grammatical person
*Noun class

Gender-inclusive language

*Generic antecedents
*Gender-neutral language in English
*Gender-specific job title
*Gender-specific pronoun

Notes

Bibliography

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

External links

* [http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/eduweb/engl401/grammar/index.htm An overview of the grammar of Old English]
*
* [http://ling.upenn.edu/%7Eurih/numerals.pdf "The morphology of gender in Hebrew and Arabic numerals", by Uri Horesh] (PDF)