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In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called gender.There are different views whether or not Plurale tantum have a gender if a language does not distinguish between genders in plural:
The values present in a given language, of which there are usually two or three, are called the genders of that language.
Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", whereas others use different definitions for each. Many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to sex or gender. According to one estimate, gender is used in approximately half of the world's . According to one definition: "Genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words."
Common gender divisions include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine, and neuter; or animacy 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 biological sex, 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, "" or non-humanness, and biological sex.
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 to 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.
These related words can be, depending on the language: , , numerals, quantifiers, , , past and passive , articles, , adverbs, , and . Gender class may be marked on the noun itself, but will also always be marked on other constituents in a noun phrase or sentence. If the noun is explicitly marked, both trigger and target may feature similar alternations.
Moreover, grammatical gender may serve to distinguish homophones. It is a quite common phenomenon in language development for two 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") and ("skin") are homophones , but disagree in gender: le pot vs. la peau.
The dialect of the old Norwegian capital Bergen also uses common gender and neuter exclusively. The common gender in Bergen and in Danish is inflected with the same articles and suffixes as the masculine gender in Norwegian Bokmål. This makes some obviously feminine noun phrases like "a cute girl", "the well milking cow" or "the pregnant mares" sound strange to most Norwegian ears when spoken by Danes and people from Bergen since they are inflected in a way that sounds like the masculine declensions in South-Eastern Norwegian dialects.
The same does not apply to Swedish language common gender, as the declensions follow a different pattern from both the Norwegian written languages. Norwegian Nynorsk, Norwegian Bokmål and most spoken dialects retain masculine, feminine and neuter even if their Scandinavian neighbors have lost one of the genders. As shown, the merger of masculine and feminine in these languages and dialects can be considered a reversal of the original split in Proto-Indo-European .
Caveats of this research include the possibility of subjects "using grammatical gender as a strategy for performing the task",Boroditsky et al. (2003), cited in Pavlidou & Alvanoudi (2013). 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.Sera et al. (2002) and Vigliocco et al. (2005), cited in Pavlidou & Alvanoudi (2013).
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 (, ) more often used the words 'beautiful', 'elegant', 'pretty', and 'slender', while Spanish speakers, whose word for 'bridge' is masculine (puente, ), 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.
Many authors prefer the term noun class when none of the inflections in a language relate to sex, such as when an Animacy–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 sexual meaning.
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 Chinese classifier 个 (個) is frequently used as an alternative to various more specific classifiers.
The gender of a noun may affect the modifications that the noun itself undergoes, particularly the way in which the noun inflection for number and grammatical case. For example, a language like Latin, German language or Russian language has a number of different declension patterns, and which pattern a particular noun follows may be highly correlated with its gender. A concrete example is provided by the German word , 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 language, 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 "girl" changes into ferch after the definite article. This only occurs with feminine singular nouns: "son" remains unchanged. Adjectives are affected by gender in a similar way.
| + Soft initial mutation caused by gender in Welsh |
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.
These related words can be, depending on the language: , , numerals, quantifiers, , , past and passive , , adverbs, , and . Gender class may be marked on the noun itself, but can also be marked on other constituents in a noun phrase or sentence. If the noun is explicitly marked, both trigger and target may feature similar alternations.
As an example, we consider Spanish language, a language with two gender categories: "natural" vs "grammatical". "Natural" gender can be masculine or feminine, while "grammatical" gender can be masculine, feminine, or neuter. This third, or "neuter" gender is reserved for abstract concepts derived from adjectives: such as lo bueno, lo malo ("that which is good/bad"). Natural gender refers to the biological sex of most animals and people, while grammatical gender refers to certain phonetic characteristics (the sounds at the end, or beginning) of a noun. Among other lexical items, the definite article changes its form according to this categorization. In the singular, the article is: (masculine), and (feminine). Thus, in "natural gender", nouns referring to sexed beings who are male beings carry the masculine article, and female beings the feminine article (agreement).These examples are based on an example in French from
| +Example of natural gender in Spanish | |
| Masculine | |
| Feminine |
| +Example of grammatical gender in Spanish | ||
| Masculine | Singular | |
| Plural | ||
| Feminine | Singular | |
| Plural |
Other languages, e.g. Serbo-Croatian, allow doubly marked forms both for number and gender. In these languages, each noun has a definite gender no matter the number. For example, d(j)eca "children" is feminine singularia tantum and vrata "door" is neuter pluralia tantum.
Not all languages have gendered pronouns. In languages that never had grammatical gender, there is normally just one word for "he" and "she", like in Malay language and Indonesian, in Hungarian and in Turkish language. 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 grammar, for example, is used for "he" and "she" and for "it", but in the colloquial language se is usually used for "he" and "she" as well.
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 , regardless of who is speaking; but this word becomes feminine or masculine depending on the sex of the speaker, as may be reflected through adjective agreement: je suis fort e ('I am strong', spoken/written by a female); je suis fort (the same but by a male).
In null-subject languages (and in some elliptical expressions in other languages), such agreement may take place even though the pronoun does not in fact appear. For example, in Portuguese:
When a language has gendered pronouns, the use of a particular word as a dummy pronoun may involve the selection of a particular gender, even though there is no noun to agree with. In languages with a neuter gender, a neuter pronoun is usually used, as in German es regnet ("it rains, it's raining"), where is the neuter third person singular pronoun. (English behaves similarly, because the word it comes from the Old English neuter gender.) In languages with only masculine and feminine genders, the dummy pronoun may be the masculine third person singular, as in the French for "it's raining": il pleut (where means "he", or "it" when referring to masculine nouns); although some languages use the feminine, as in the equivalent Welsh language sentence: mae hi'n bwrw glaw (where the dummy pronoun is , which means "she", or "it" when referring to feminine nouns).
A similar, apparently arbitrary gender assignment may need to be made in the case of indefinite pronouns, where the referent is generally unknown. In this case the question is usually not which pronoun to use, but which gender to assign a given pronoun to (for such purposes as adjective agreement). For example, the French pronouns ("someone"), ("no-one") and ("something") are all treated as masculine—this is in spite of the fact that the last two correspond to feminine nouns (personne meaning "person", and meaning "thing").
Other examples include:
When a noun with conflicting natural and grammatical gender is the antecedent of a pronoun, it may not be clear which gender of pronoun to choose. There is a certain tendency to keep the grammatical gender when a close back-reference is made, but to switch to natural gender when the reference is further away. For example, in German, the sentences "The girl has come home from school. She is now doing her homework" can be translated in two ways:
This phenomenon is quite popular in Slavic languages: for example Polish (deprecative "creature") is feminine but can be used to refer to both man (masculine gender), woman (feminine gender), child (neuter gender) or even animate nouns (e.g. a dog being masculine). Similarly with other deprecatory nouns as , , , , ("wuss, klutz"); ("mute") can be used deprecatively as described previously, and then can be used for verbs marked for the male and female genders.
As regards the pronouns used to refer to animals, these generally agree in gender with the nouns denoting those animals, rather than the animals' sex (natural gender). In a language like English, which does not assign grammatical gender to nouns, the pronoun used for referring to objects ( it) is often used for animals also. However, if the sex of the animal is known, and particularly in the case of companion animals, the gendered pronouns ( he and she) may be used as they would be for a human.
In Polish language, a few general words such as zwierzę ("animal") or bydlę ("animal, one head of cattle") are neuter, but most species names are masculine or feminine. When the sex of an animal is known, it will normally be referred to using gendered pronouns consistent with its sex; otherwise the pronouns will correspond to the gender of the noun denoting its species.
In most languages that have grammatical gender, a combination of these three types of criteria is found, although one type may be more prevalent.
For example, in Portuguese and Spanish language, 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.
often carry a specific gender. For example, in German language, 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' . Similarly, the suffix -ling, which makes count noun 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 produces masculine nouns. And the German suffixes -heit and -keit (comparable with -hood and -ness in English) produce feminine nouns.
In Irish language, most nouns ending with a broad consonant are masculine, those ending with a slender consonant are feminine (see Irish phonology), with significant exceptions: nouns ending in -óir/-eoir and -ín are always masculine, whereas those ending -óg/-eog or -lann are always feminine.
In Arabic language, nouns whose singular form ends in a tāʾ marbūṭah (traditionally a , becoming in pausa) are of feminine gender, the only significant exceptions being the word خليفة ("caliph") and certain masculine personal names ( أسامة ʾUsāmah). However, many masculine nouns have a broken plural ending in a tāʾ marbūṭa; for example أستاذ ("male professor") has the plural أساتذة , which might be confused for a feminine singular noun. Gender may also be predictable from the type of derivation: for instance, the verbal nouns of Stem II (e.g. التفعيل , from فعّل، يفعّل ) are always masculine.
In French language, nouns ending in -e tend to be feminine, whereas others tend to be masculine, but there are many exceptions to this ( cadre, arbre, signe, meuble, nuage are masculine as façon, chanson, voix, main, eau are feminine), note the many masculine nouns ending in -e preceded by double consonants. Certain suffixes are quite reliable indicators, such as -age, which when added to a verb ( garer "to park" → garage; nettoyer "to clean" → nettoyage "cleaning") indicates a masculine noun; however, when -age is part of the root of the word, it can be feminine, as in plage ("beach") or image. On the other hand, nouns ending in -tion, -sion and -aison are almost all feminine, with a few exceptions, such as cation, bastion.
Nouns can sometimes vary their form to enable the derivation of differently gendered cognate nouns; for example, to produce nouns with a similar meaning but referring to someone of a different sex. Thus, in Spanish, niño means "boy", and niña means "girl". This paradigm can be exploited for making new words: 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.
In the same way, are frequently constructed with affixes that identify the sex of the bearer. Common feminine suffixes used in English names are -a, of Latin language or Romance origin ( Robert and Roberta); and -e, of French language origin (cf. Justin and Justine).
Although gender inflection may be used to construct nouns and names for people of different sexes in languages that have grammatical gender, this alone does not constitute grammatical gender. Distinct words and names for men and women are also common in languages which do not have a grammatical gender system for nouns in general. English, for example, has feminine suffixes such as -ess (as in waitress), and also distinguishes male and female personal names, as in the above examples.
Classical Latin typically made a grammatical feminine gender with -a (silva "forest", aqua "water") and this was reflected in feminine names originating in that period, like Emilia. Romance languages preserved this characteristic. For example, in Spanish, approximately 89% of nouns that end in -a or - á are classified as feminine; the same is true for 98% of given names with the -a ending. Namepedia Blog – Why Most European Names Ending in A Are Female
In the Germanic languages the female names have been Latinized by adding -e and -a: Brunhild, Kriemhild and Hroswith became Brunhilde, Kriemhilde and Hroswitha. Slavic feminine given names: Olga (Russian), Małgorzata (Polish), Tetiana (Ukrainian), Oksana (Belarusian), Eliška (Czech), Bronislava (Slovak), Milica (Serbian), Darina (Bulgarian), Lucja (Croatian), Lamija (Bosnian) and Zala (Slovenian).
To complicate matters, Greek often offers additional informal versions of these. The corresponding for English are the following: εγγλέζος (), Εγγλέζα (), εγγλέζικος (), εγγλέζικη (), εγγλέζικο (). The formal forms come from the name Αγγλία () "England", while the less formal are derived from Italian inglese.
Another example is the Dizi language, which has two asymmetrical genders. The feminine includes all living beings of female sex (e.g. woman, girl, cow...) and ; 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 language, 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 are very similar in this respect, although the English gendered pronouns ( he, she) are used for domestic animals if the sex 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 languages with masculine and feminine gender, the masculine is usually employed by default to refer to persons of unknown gender and to groups of people of mixed gender. Thus, in French the feminine plural pronoun elles always designates an all-female group of people (or stands for a group of nouns all of feminine gender), but the masculine equivalent ils may refer to a group of males or masculine nouns, to a mixed group, or to a group of people of unknown genders. In such cases, one says that the feminine gender is markedness, whereas the masculine gender is unmarked.
In English, the problem of gender determination does not arise in the plural, because gender in that language is reflected only in pronouns, and the plural pronoun they does not have gendered forms. In the singular, however, the issue frequently arises when a person of unspecified or unknown gender is being referred to. In this case it the Singular they has been traditional. Since the 18th century it has been prescribed to use the masculine ( he), but other solutions are now often preferred.
In languages with a neuter gender, such as Slavic languages and Germanic languages, the neuter is often used for indeterminate gender reference, particularly when the things referred to are not people. In some cases this may even apply when referring to people, particularly children. For example, in English, one may use it to refer to a child, particularly when speaking generically rather than about a particular child of known sex.
In Icelandic (which preserves a masculine–feminine–neuter distinction in both singular and plural), the neuter plural can be used for groups of people of mixed gender, when specific people are meant. For example:
In Swedish language (which has an overall common–neuter gender system), masculinity may be argued to be a marked feature, because in the weak adjectival declension there is a distinct ending (-e) for naturally masculine nouns (as in min lill ebror, "my little brother"). In spite of this, the third-person singular masculine pronoun han would normally be the default for a person of unknown gender, although in practice the indefinite pronoun man and the reflexive sig or its possessive forms sin/sitt/sina usually make this unnecessary.
In Polish language, where a gender-like distinction is made in the plural between "masculine personal" and all other cases , a group is treated as masculine personal if it contains at least one male person.
In languages which preserve a three-way gender division in the plural, the rules for determining the gender (and sometimes number) of a coordinated noun phrase ("... and ...") may be quite complex. Czech language is an example of such a language, with a division (in the plural) between masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine, and neuter. The rules for gender and number of coordinated phrases in that language are summarized at .
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).
It is a matter of analysis how to draw the line between a single polysemy word with multiple genders and a set of 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".
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.
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.)
Sometimes the gender of a word switches with time. For example, the Russian modern loanword виски (viski) "whisky" was originally feminine,In a translation of Jack London stories, 1915 then masculine,In a song of Alexander Vertinsky, 1920s or 1930s and today it has become neuter.
Similarly, argues Zuckermann, the Israeli neologism for "library", ספריה (), matches the feminine gender of the parallel pre-existent European words: Yiddish , Russian , Polish biblioteka, German Bibliothek and French bibliothèque, as well as of the pre-existent Arabic word for "library": مكتبة (, also feminine. The result of this neologism might have been, more generally, the strengthening of Israeli יה- () as a productive feminine locative suffix (combined with the influence of Polish -ja and Russian -ия ()).
Grammatical gender is found in many Indo-European languages (including Spanish language, French language, Russian language, and German language—but not English language, Bengali language, Armenian or Persian language, for example), Afroasiatic languages (which includes the Semitic and Berber languages, etc.), and in other language families such as Dravidian and Northeast Caucasian, as well as several Australian Aboriginal languages such as Dyirbal language, 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 languages, Mongolic, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, Uralic languages 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.
Research indicates that the earliest stages of Proto-Indo-European had two genders (animate and inanimate), as did Hittite language, 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. How did genders and cases develop in Indo-European? The Original Nominal System of Proto-Indoeuropean – Case and Gender
Many Indo-European languages retained the three genders, including most Slavic languages, Latin, Sanskrit, Ancient and Modern Greek language, German language, Icelandic, Romanian grammar and Asturian (two Romance language exceptions). In them, there is a high but not absolute correlation between grammatical gender and 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 pronouns 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 , , , and ); Armenian, Bengali language, Persian language, Sorani Kurdish, Ossetic, Odia language, Khowar language, 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 .
There are a few traces of gender marking in Modern English:
However, these are relatively insignificant features compared with a typical language with full grammatical gender. English nouns are not generally considered to belong to gender classes in the way that French, German or Russian nouns are. There is no gender agreement in English between nouns and their modifiers (articles, other , or , with the occasional exception such as blond/blonde, a spelling convention borrowed from French). Gender agreement applies in effect only to pronouns, with the choice of pronoun determined through semantics and/or pragmatics rather than on any conventional assignment of particular nouns to particular genders.
Only a relatively small number of English nouns have distinct male and female forms; many of them are from non-Germanic languages (the suffixes -rix and -ress in words such as aviatrix and waitress, for instance, derive directly or indirectly from Latin). English has no live productive gender markers. An example of such a marker might be the suffix -ette (of French provenance), but this is seldom used today, surviving mostly in either historical contexts or with disparaging or humorous intent.
The gender of an English pronoun typically coincides with the natural gender of its referent, rather than with the grammatical gender of its antecedent. The choice between she, he, they, and it comes down to whether the pronoun is intended to designate a woman, a man, or someone or something else. There are certain exceptions, however:
Problems arise when selecting a personal pronoun to refer to someone of unspecified or unknown gender . In the past and to some degree still in the present, the masculine has been used as the "default" gender in English. The use of the plural pronoun they with singular reference is common in practice. The neuter it may be used for a baby but not normally for an older child or adult. Other genderless pronouns exist, such as the impersonal pronoun one, but they are not generally substitutable for a personal pronoun.
In Russian, the different treatment of animate nouns involves their accusative case (and that of adjectives qualifying them) being formed identically to the genitive rather than to the nominative. In the singular that applies to masculine nouns only, but in the plural it applies in all genders.
A similar system applies Czech declension, but the situation is somewhat different in the plural: Only masculine nouns are affected, and the distinctive feature is a particular inflective ending for masculine animate nouns in the nominative plural, and for adjectives and verbs agreeing with those nouns.
Polish morphology might be said to distinguish five genders: personal masculine (referring to male humans), animate non-personal masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter. The animate–inanimate opposition for the masculine gender applies in the singular, and the personal–impersonal opposition, which classes animals along with inanimate objects, applies in the plural. (A few nouns denoting inanimate things are treated grammatically as animate and vice versa.) The manifestations of the differences are as follows:
A few nouns have both personal and impersonal forms, depending on meaning for example, klient may behave as an impersonal noun when it refers to a client in the computing sense.
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