Grammatical gender is a system in some languages where nouns are classified by gender, often masculine, feminine or neuter. Adjectives and articles must agree. Some languages have more extensive and complex gender systems, including assigning gender based on animate and inanimate categories or physical forms of objects.
Grammatical gender is a system in the grammar of some languages in which nouns are classified as belonging to a certain gender – often masculine, feminine or neuter – and other noun-related parts of speech, such as adjectives or articles, must agree. For example, in English, nouns with natural gender, such as “boy” or “girl,” must agree in gender with any pronoun used to represent them. Therefore, “she She is a nice boy” is ungrammatical in English. Other languages around the world have much more extensive and complex gender systems.
In many languages, grammatical gender and natural gender are related rather loosely, much to the frustration of second language learners. In French and Spanish, every noun is either masculine or feminine, so things that would seem genderless to an English speaker are assigned to one or the other class. In such languages, grammatical gender is often more morphological – related to the sound of the word – than semantic – related to its meaning. In Spanish, for example, words ending in -o are typically masculine and words ending in -a are typically feminine. An example of a word with a gender that differs from its natural gender is the German Maedchen, or “maiden,” which is classified grammatically as neuter rather than feminine.
In some grammars, including those of many Native American and African languages, gender can refer to distinctions other than masculine and feminine. Many languages, for example, assign grammatical gender according to the animate and inanimate categories. Languages of the Caucasian family often have four genders: feminine, masculine, animate and inanimate. Again, non-native speakers often find these grammatical distinctions unexpected; celestial bodies and plants may be considered “animate” in some languages. Grammatical gender, for the most part, follows enough basic patterns that one can make an educated guess about the gender of an unfamiliar word, but some degree of memorization is usually required.
More unusual systems of grammatical gender can be found around the world. Dyirbal, an Australian Aboriginal language, famously includes a gender category for “women, fire and dangerous things”. Some languages have genders based on the physical forms of objects, and some languages have more than ten noun classes.
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