Grammatical gender
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In linguistics, the term gender refers to various forms of expressing biological or sociological gender by inflecting words. By extension, the same term is used for the expression of non-sexual natural characteristics by inflecting words, although many authors prefer the term noun classes when none of the inflections in a language relate to sexuality. Note however that the word "gender" derives from Latin genus, which is also the root of genre, and originally meant "kind", so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning.
Noun classes may be expressed on nouns and pronouns alone, or in other parts of speech as well. An example of the former are the English words actor and actress, where the suffix -or denotes a male person or a person of unknown gender (masculine), and the suffix -ress (derived from French -rice) denotes a female person (feminine). This type of noun inflection is very rare in English, but quite common in other languages, including most of the Indo-European family, to which English belongs. Modern English normally does not mark nouns for gender, but it does express it through the third person singular personal pronouns he (male person), she (female person), and it (object, abstraction, or animal), and their other inflected forms.
When gender is expressed on other parts of speech, besides nouns and pronouns, the language is said to have grammatical gender. For example, in French the sentences Il est un grand acteur and Elle est une grande actrice mean "He is a great actor" and "She is a great actress", respectively. Not only do the nouns (acteur, actrice) and the pronouns (il, elle) denote the gender of their referent, but so do the articles (un, une) and the adjectives (grand, grande). This never occurs in Modern English, which therefore does not have grammatical gender. Old English had grammatical gender (example below), but with time its gender inflections were simplified, began to be confused with one another, and eventually merged.
In a language with grammatical gender, each form of a determiner is associated with one gender, and therefore all nouns must be assigned a gender, whatever their meaning. In some cases, this conventional gender will have little or no relation to the natural gender of the referent. For instance, the gender assigned to animals, inanimate objects and abstractions is often arbitrary. In Latin and in Romance languages the word Sol (Sun) is masculine and the word Luna (Moon) is feminine, while in German and Germanic languages in general the opposite occurs.
In languages without inflectional noun classes, nouns may still be extensively categorized by independent particles called noun classifiers.
Lexical gender
Languages without grammatical gender can have quite pervasive lexical marking of natural 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, 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 switch 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 a few lexical markers of gender in nouns, which however are seldom used, and often with humorous intent. An example is the suffix -ette (of French provenance) in rockette, from rocket.
Personal pronouns
Personal pronouns often have different forms based on the natural gender of their referent. 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, ships or machines, this is considered personification. In modern English, the personal pronouns essentially denote natural gender. (Compare the example of Old English, below.)
Gendered pronouns and their corresponding inflections vary considerably across languages. For example, Finnish and Hungarian differentiate between humans and inanimate objects, but not between male and female humans (even this distinction is often ignored in spoken Finnish). Both use a single pronoun for "he" and "she", hän in Finnish and ő in Hungarian.
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 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).
For Russian gender-related tradition of personal naming, see Names in Russian Empire, Soviet Union and CIS countries.
Grammatical gender
A language has grammatical gender when changes in the gender of a noun necessarily induce morphological changes in determiners 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. Along with the the change in the words for "man" and "woman" (hombre vs. mujer), there is also a change in 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 have to be 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, so Modern English lacks grammatical gender. This is unusual for an Indo-European language (another example is Afrikaans), but not uncommon in other language families. Sino-Tibetan languages, for instance, usually do not have grammatical gender.
Noun classes may be marked in other ways. 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 initial mutation, where the first consonant changes to another in certain conditions. Gender is one of the factors that 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'). Adjectives are affected by gender in a similar way: 'the big girl' is y ferch fawr, but 'the big son' is y mab mawr.
Curzan's example in Old English above illustrates another important fact: every noun must have a gender, even the name of an inanimate object like "shield", but the gender assigned to a noun isn't always what one might expect from the tripartite classification into "masculine", "feminine" and "neuter". So how is grammatical gender assigned? What makes a shield grammatically "feminine"?
There are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders or noun classes: according to logical or symbolic similarities in their meaning (semantic criterium), by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphology), or through an arbitrary convention. Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent.
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.
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 class marker ki-, which marks class 7 singular nouns, appears on the adjective -kubwa and on the verb -anguka, so as to agree with the class 7 noun kitabu 'book':
- kitabu kikubwa kinaanguka
(cl.7-book cl.7-big cl.7-PRESENT-fall)
- 'The big book falls.'
The Nostratic language, a hypothesized ancestor of Indo-European and other language families, had the noun classes "human", "animal", and "object".
Common criteria for defining noun classes include:
- animate vs. inanimate (as in Ojibwe)
- rational vs. non-rational (as in Tamil)
- human vs. non-human
- male vs. other
- male human vs. other
- masculine vs. feminine
- masculine vs. feminine vs. neuter
- strong vs. weak
- augmentative vs. diminutive
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 neuter, respectively.
Noun classes and 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, regardless of their meaning. Nouns that end in some other vowel are assigned a gender either according to etymology, or by an arbitrary convention. Apart from words that refer to human beings and some animals, there is no semantic value to the labels "masculine" and "feminine". The overlap between grammatical gender and morphology may, however, not be complete: problema (problem) is masculine (though this is for etymological reasons), and radio (radio station) is feminine (because it's a shortening of estación de radio, a phrase whose head is the feminine noun estación).
Morphology may override meaning, in some cases. In German, all nouns ending in -ung (corresponding to -ing in English) are grammatically feminine, and diminutives with the endings -lein and -chen (meaning little, young) are neuter, so that Mädchen (girl) and Fräulein (young woman) are neuter. 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 (woman) also being neuter), but the feminine gender remains for some words denoting objects. In Spanish, 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.
Noun classes and convention
Not all languages with noun classes exhibit distinctive markings for each class. 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 nothing intrinsic about a table makes it masculine, as in German Tisch, or neuter, as in 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.
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 with a semantic value, "animate" and "inanimate".
Indeterminate gender
In languages with masculine and feminine genders, 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".
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 pronoun, "they". However, a group of actors and actresses can still be described as a group of "actors".
Animals and gender
The relation between natural gender and lexical or grammatical 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). 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, French chat (male cat) and chatte (female cat).
Noun classes in specific linguistic families
Afro-Asiatic languages
Afro-Asiatic languages typically have two genders, masculine and feminine, and inflect verbs for gender.
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 (Southern Athabaskan) nouns are classified according to their animacy, shape, and consistency. 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, which has 16 noun classes.
Caucasian languages
Of the 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: 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 human male/human female/non-human 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.
An entire website has been devoted to exploring the possibilities of inanimate genders in Caucasian languages.
Indo-European languages
In its classical reconstruction, Proto-Indo-European had three genders, "masculine", "feminine", and "neuter". Many of its descendants have retained the same three-way gender classification. Such is the case of most Slavic languages, classical Latin, ancient Greek and modern Greek, for instance. Other Indo-European languages reduced the number of genders to two, either by losing the neuter (like the Celtic languages and most Romance languages), 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 lost grammatical gender altogether.
Even in those where the original three genders have been mostly lost or reduced, however, there may still be a trace of gender in some parts of speech. Thus, Modern English has kept the three-way division of personal pronouns into he (masculine), she (feminine) and it (neuter). Spanish distinguishes between the definite articles el (masculine), la (feminine) and lo (neuter), where the latter designates abstractions (e.g. lo único "the only thing"; lo mismo "the same thing"). Portuguese has a semantically neuter indefinite pronoun, tudo ("everything," used without a definite referent); cf. todo, masculine (e.g. todo livro "every book"), toda, feminine (e.g. "toda salada" "every salad"). In terms of agreement, however, these "neuter" words count as masculine: both el and lo take masculine adjectives in Spanish, as do todo and tudo in Portuguese. And, in English, no determiners are ever inflected to agree with he, she, or it.
Exceptionally for a Romance language, Romanian has preserved all three genders of Latin, but the neuter is now 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.
Niger-Congo languages
Bantu languages
According to Carl Meinhof, the Bantu languages have a total of 22 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 has 15 classes, and 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
The Zande language distinguishes four noun classes:
| 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.
Noun classes in specific languages
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List of languages without grammatical genders/noun classes
- Afrikaans
- Armenian
- Basque
- Bengali
- Bislama
- Bugis
- Burmese
- Cebuano
- Central Yup'ik
- Chinese
- Chol
- English English has a vestigial natural gender system (on pronouns) but no grammatical gender.
- Estonian
- Esperanto Esperanto has, however, gender-marked third-person pronouns and a feminine marker suffix.
- Finnish
- Georgian
- Guaraní
- Hawaiian
- Hungarian
- 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
- Indonesian
- Interlingua
- Japanese
- Kannada
- Khmer
- Korean
- Lao
- Lojban
- Malagasy
- Malay
- Malayalam
- Makasar
- Mandar
- Papiamentu
- Persian
- Nahuatl
- Pirahã
- Quechua
- Quenya
- Sindarin
- Sinhala
- Sami languages
- Tagalog
- Telugu
- Tlingit
- Thai
- Tok Pisin
- Toki Pona
- Tulu
- Turkish
- Tzotzil
- Tzeltal
- Vietnamese
- Yoruba
List of languages with grammatical genders/noun classes
- Albanian
- Ancient Egyptian
- Ancient Greek
- Akkadian
- Arabic
- Aramaic
- Bosnian
- Bulgarian
- Catalan
- Coptic
- Cornish
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dari-Persian
- Dutch
- Faroese
- French
- German
- Greek
- Gujarati
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Icelandic
- Irish
- Italian
- Klingon
- Latin
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Marathi
- Manx
- Norwegian
- Occitan
- Old English
- Old Prussian
- Pashto
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Punjabi
- Romanian
- Russian
- Sanskrit
- Scottish Gaelic
- Serbian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Sorbian
- Spanish
- Sumerian
- Swahili
- Swedish
- Tamazight (Berber)
- Tajiki Persian
- Ukrainian
- Urdu
- Welsh
- Yiddish
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Two genders/noun classes
Masculine and feminine
- Akkadian
- Ancient Egyptian
- Arabic
- Aramaic
- Bengali
- Catalan
- Coptic
- French
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Irish
- Italian
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Occitan
- Punjabi
- Portuguese
- Scottish Gaelic
- Spanish
- Tamazight (Berber)
- Urdu
- Welsh
Common and neuter
- Danish
- Hittite
- Low German
- Norwegian (Riksmål)
- Swedish
Animate and inanimate
Three grammatical genders/noun classes
Masculine, feminine, and neuter
- Albanian (neuter has almost disappeared)
- Ancient Greek
- Belarusian
- Bosnian
- Bulgarian
- Croatian
- Czech
- Dutch (masculine and feminine have merged; however, a difference is still made; See gender in Dutch grammar).
- Faroese
- German
- Greek
- Gujarati
- Icelandic
- Latin
- Marathi
- Norwegian
- Old English
- Old Prussian
- Polish (only two genders: masculine-personal and other in plural)
- Romanian
- Russian
- Sanskrit
- Serbian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Sorbian
- Tamil (there is also a 4th gender, equivalent of "Sir" in English, used for teachers, and higher officials, to speak with respect)
- Ukrainian
- Yiddish
Three genders, other classifications
- Klingon (being capable of speaking, body part and other)
More than three grammatical genders/noun classes
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- Swahili
- Zulu
- Dyirbal
- 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 distinguishes singular masculine animated versus inanimated nouns and plural masculine human vs. non-human nouns
- Swedish distinguishes masculine (han), feminine (hon), neuter (det) and non-masculine non-feminine non-neuter (den)
More than three noun classes counting measure words
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.
- Pinker, Steven (1994) The Language Instinct, William Morrow and Company.
- 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).
See also
- Agreement (linguistics)
- Noun classifier
- Grammatical number
- Grammatical person
- Inflection
- Synthetic language
- Gender-neutral language
- Gender-neutral pronoun
- Loss of the neuter gender in Romance languages
External links
- Chapter 2 of van Berkum, J.J.A. (1996) The psycholinguistics of grammatical gender: Studies in language comprehension and production, "The linguistics of gender"
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