Gender in English

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.[1][2]

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.[3]

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. OverviewMany 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:

Gender Noun Phrase Meaning
Masculine ręcznik duży ręcznik big towel
Feminine encyklopedia duża encyklopedia big encyclopaedia
Neuter krzesło duże krzesło big chair


As can be seen, the neuter gender does not include all nouns that correspond to genderless realities. Some of these may be designated by nouns that are grammatically masculine or feminine. Also, some nouns that refer to males or females may have a different grammatical gender. In general, the boundaries of noun classes are rather arbitrary, although there are rules of thumb in many languages. In this context, the terms "masculine", "feminine" and "neuter" should be understood merely as convenient labels. They are suggestive class descriptors, but not every member of a class is well described by its label.

Gender marking is not substantial in modern English. However, distinctions in personal pronouns have been inherited from Old English which can be used to give a flavour of how grammatical gender works.
John insisted that he would pay for his own dinner.
Jane insisted that she would pay for her own dinner.
Here, the gender of the subject is marked both on the personal pronouns (he/she) and on the possessive adjectives (his/her). Marking of gender on the possessive form can be considered redundant in these examples, since his own and her own must refer to their respective antecedents, he and she, which are already unambiguously marked for gender.

A full system of grammatical gender involves two phenomena:
Inflection: Many words have different forms for different genders, and certain morphological markers are characteristic of each gender.
Agreement: Every noun is associated with one gender class. In a phrase or clause, words that refer to a given noun inflect to match the gender of that noun.


Note that some words, called epicene, may have identical forms for different genders. For example, in Spanish estudiante "student" and grande "big" can be masculine or feminine.

Spanish is also an example of a language with only two genders, masculine and feminine; it has no neuter noun class. Nouns that designate entities with no natural gender, such as objects or abstractions, are distributed among the masculine and the feminine. In a few other languages, notably Germanic languages like Swedish, the former masculine and feminine genders have become indistinguishable with time, merging into a new class called the common gender, which however remains distinct from the neuter gender.[4]
Common gender: includes most words that refer to males or females, but is distinct from the neuter gender.
Other languages still, like English, are regarded as not having grammatical gender, since they do not make gender distinctions through inflection, and do not generally require gender agreement between related words.

Some authors have extended the concept of "grammatical gender" to the expression of other types of natural, individual characteristics through inflection, such as animacy. See the section on gender across languages, below.

Grammatical gender (with masculine and/or feminine categories) is commonly found in Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Indo-European, Northeast Caucasian, and several Australian aboriginal languages. It is mostly absent in the Altaic, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, and Uralic language families. The Niger-Congo languages typically have an extensive system of noun classes, which some authors regard as a type of grammatical gender, but others describe as something completely different. Gender inflectionIn many languages, gender is marked quite profusely, surfacing in contexts where an English speaker might not expect it.


"I love you" in Arabic:
: said to a male: uħibbuka (أُحِبُّكََ)
: said to a female: uħibbuki (أُحِبُّكِ)



"Thank you very much" in Portuguese:
: said by a male: muito obrigado
: said by a female: muito obrigada


The switch from one gender to the other is typically achieved by inflecting appropriate words, the object suffix of the verb uħibbu-ka/ki in the Arabic example,[5] and the subject suffix in the past participle (or adjective) obrig-ado/a in the Portuguese example.

In Spanish, most masculine nouns and modifiers end with the suffix -o or with a consonant, while the suffix -a is characteristic of feminine nouns (though there are exceptions). Thus, niño means “boy”, and niña means “girl”. This paradigm is regularly exploited for making neologisms: 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.

Sometimes, gender is expressed in more subtle ways. On the whole, gender marking has been lost in Welsh, both on the noun, and, often, on the adjective. However, it has the peculiar feature of initial mutation, where the first consonant of a word changes into another in certain syntactical conditions. Gender is one of the factors that can cause mutation, especially the so-called soft mutation. For instance, the word merch, which means girl or daughter, changes into ferch after the definite article. This only occurs with feminine nouns; for example, mab "son" remains unchanged after the definite article. Adjectives are affected by gender in a similar way.

Gender Default After definite article With adjective
Masculine mab son y mab the son y mab mawr the big son
Feminine merch girl y ferch the girl y ferch fawr the big girl

Personal names
Main article: Personal name
Personal names are frequently constructed with language-specific affixes that identify the gender of the bearer. 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). Although gender inflections may be used to construct cognate nouns for people of opposite genders in languages that have grammatical gender, this alone does not constitute grammatical gender. Distinct names for men and women are also common in languages where gender is not grammatical.
Personal pronouns
Main articles: Gender-specific pronoun and Gender-neutral pronoun


Personal pronouns often have different forms based on gender. Even though it has lost grammatical gender, English still distinguishes between "he" (generally applied to a male person), "she" (female person), and "it" (object, abstraction, or animal). But this also does not guarantee the existence of grammatical gender. There is a spoken form, "they", which although not part of the standard literary language, is cosmopolitan in the English-speaking world and is used when the gender of a person being referred to is not known. Gendered pronouns and their corresponding inflections vary considerably across languages. In languages that never had grammatical gender, there is normally just one word for "he" and "she", like hän in Finnish and ő in Hungarian. These languages have different pronouns and inflections in the third person only to differentiate between people and inanimate objects (and even this distinction is commonly waived in spoken Finnish).
Dummy pronouns
In languages with only a masculine and a feminine gender, the default dummy pronoun is usually the masculine third person singular. For example, the French sentence for "It's raining" is Il pleut, literally "He rains". There are some exceptions: the corresponding sentence in Welsh is Mae hi'n bwrw glaw, literally "She's raining". Gender agreementIn the French sentences Il est un grand acteur "He is a great actor" and Elle est une grande actrice "She is a great actress", almost every word changes to match the gender of the subject. The noun acteur inflects by changing the masculine suffix -eur into the feminine suffix -rice, the personal pronoun il "he" changes to elle "she", and the feminine suffix -e is added to the article (un → une) and to the adjective (grand → grande). Only the verb est "is" remains unchanged.

Curzan illustrates gender agreement in Old English with the following “highly contrived” example:

Old English Seo brade lind wæs tilu and ic hire lufod.
Literal translation That broad shield was good and I her loved.
Modern English That broad shield was good and I loved it.


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 genderThe grammatical gender of a word doesn't 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 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 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". Vegetables are typically grouped with inanimate objects.

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".
Objects and abstractions
Since all nouns must belong to some noun class, many end up with genders which are purely conventional. For instance, in Latin and in the Romance languages derived from it the word Sol "Sun" is masculine and the word Luna "Moon" is feminine, but in German and other Germanic languages the opposite occurs: Sonne "Sun" is feminine, while 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, in Polish the word księżyc "Moon" is masculine, but its Russian counterpart луна is feminine. The Russian word for the Sun Солнце (Solntse) is neither masculine nor feminine but neuter). Also, in Russian the word собака "dog" is feminine, but its Ukrainian counterpart (with the same spelling and almost identical pronunciation) is masculine.

Polish księżyc Moon masculine
Russian луна Moon feminine
Russian картофель potato masculine
Russian картошка spud feminine[6]


There is nothing inherent about the Moon or a potato which makes them objectively "male" or "female". In these cases, gender is quite independent of meaning, and a property of the nouns themselves, rather than of their referents.

Sometimes the gender switches: Russian тополь (poplar) is now masculine, but less than 200 years ago (in writings of Lermontov) it was feminine. The modern loanword виски (from whisky/whiskey) was originally feminine (in a translation of Jack London stories, 1915), then masculine (in a song of Alexander Vertinsky, 1920s or 1930s), and finally it is neuter (today the masculine variant is typically considered archaic, and feminine one is completely forgotten). Gender assignmentThere are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders: according to logical or symbolic similarities in their meaning (semantic criterion), by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphology), or through an arbitrary convention (possibly rooted in the language's history). Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent.
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 found in some languages even in the Indo-European family.

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 masculine, respectively. In Polish, the nouns mężczyzna "man" and książę "prince" are masculine, even though words with the ending -a are normally feminine and words that end with -ę are usually neuter. See also Synesis.
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, whatever their meaning. (Nouns that end in some other vowel are assigned a gender either according to etymology, by analogy, or by some other convention.) Morphology may in fact override meaning, in some cases. 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.

In German also, diminutives with the endings -chen and -lein (cognates of English -kin and -ling meaning little, young) are always neuter, which is why Mädchen "girl" and Fräulein "young woman" are neuter. Another ending, the nominalizing suffix -ling, can be used to make countable nouns 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 producing masculine nouns.

On the other hand, the correlation between grammatical gender and morphology is usually not perfect: problema "problem" is masculine in Spanish (this is for etymological reasons), and radio "radio station" is feminine (because it is a shortening of estación de radio, a phrase whose head is the feminine noun estación).
Convention
In some languages, gender markers have been so eroded by time that they are no longer recognizable, even to native speakers. 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 there is nothing objective about a table which makes it feminine as French table, masculine as German Tisch, or neuter as 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, i.e. memorizing la table — where la is the French feminine singular definite article — der Tisch - where der is the German masculine singular nominative definite article — and bordet — where the suffix -et indicates the definite neuter singular in Norwegian.

Whether a distant ancestor of French, German, Norwegian, 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 noun classes with the semantic values of animate and inanimate. Gender in EnglishMain article: Gender in English
While 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.[3]

There are a few traces of gender marking in Modern English:
Some foreign nouns inflect according to gender, such as actor/actress, where the suffix -or denotes the masculine, and the suffix -ress denotes the feminine.
The third person singular pronouns (and their possessive forms) are gender specific: "he/his" (masculine gender, overall used for males), "she/her(s)" (feminine gender, for females), "it/its" (neuter gender, mainly for objects and abstractions), "one/one's" (common gender, for anyone or anything), and "who/whose" (subordinate/vocative gender, for someone in question).
A glint of gender endings live on in the cultural memory of novel terms such as fella from "fellow" or blonde from "blond". Neuter genders tend to end in t: that, it, might.
But these are insignificant features compared to a typical language with grammatical gender:
English has no live productive gender markers. An example is the suffix -ette (of French provenance) in rockette, from rocket, or trollette, from troll, but it is seldom used, and mostly with disparaging or humorous intent.
The English nouns that inflect for gender are a very small minority, typically loanwords from non-Germanic languages (the suffix -ress in the word "actress", for instance, derives from Latin -rix via French -rice). In languages with grammatical gender, there are typically thousands of words which inflect for gender.
The third-person singular forms of the personal pronouns are the only modifiers that inflect according to gender.
It is also noteworthy that, with few exceptions, the gender of an English pronoun coincides with the real gender of its referent, rather than with the grammatical gender of its antecedent, frequently different from the former in languages with true grammatical gender. The choice between "he", "she" and "it" invariably comes down to whether they designate a human male, a human female, or something else.

Some exceptions:
Animals, which can go either way, being referred to according to their sex, or as "it".
The pronoun "she" is sometimes used to refer to things which contain people such as countries, ships, and cars, or to refer to machines. This, however, is considered a stylistically marked, optional figure of speech. This usage is furthermore in decline and advised against by most journalistic style guides such as the Chicago Manual of Style.[7]
The absence of grammatical gender is unusual for an Indo-European language, though common in other language families. Gender across language familiesOther types of gender classifications
Some languages have gender-like noun classifications unrelated to gender identity. Particularly common are languages with animate and inanimate categories. The term "grammatical genders" is also used by extension in this case, although many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to sexuality. Note however that the word "gender" derives from Latin genus (also the root of genre) originally meant "kind", so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning. For further information, see Animacy.
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 0-226-46804-6).

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
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, for 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 masculine-feminine-neuter 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.
Indo-European
Many linguists think the earliest stages of Proto-Indo-European had two genders, animate and inanimate, as did Hittite, but the inanimate gender later split into neuter and feminine, originating the classical three-way classification into masculine, feminine, and neuter which most of its descendants inherited.[8][9] Many Indo-European languages kept these three genders. Such is the case of most Slavic languages, classical Latin, Sanskrit, and Greek, for instance. Other Indo-European languages reduced the number of genders to two, either by losing the neuter (like most Romance languages and the Celtic 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 all but lost grammatical gender. On the other hand, a few Slavic languages have arguably added new genders to the classical three.

Exceptionally for a Romance language, Romanian has preserved the three genders of Latin, although the neuter has been reduced to a combination of the other two, in the sense that neuter nouns have masculine endings in the singular, but feminine endings in the plural. As a consequence, adjectives, pronouns, and pronominal adjectives only have two forms, both in the singular and in the plural. The same happens in Italian, to a lesser extent. Moreover the Italian third-person singular pronouns have a "neuter" form to refer to inanimate subjects (egli/ella vs. esso/essa).

Some Slavic languages, including Russian and Czech, make grammatical distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns (in Czech only in the masculine gender; in Russian only in masculine singular, but in the plural in all genders). Another example is Polish, which can be said to distinguish five genders: personal masculine (referring to male humans), animate non-personal masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter.

masculine translation
animate inanimate
personal impersonal
Polish To jest
dobry nauczyciel. To jest
dobry pies. To jest
dobry ser. It's a good teacher
/ a good dog / good cheese.
Widzę
dobrego nauczyciela. Widzę
dobrego psa. Widzę
dobry ser. I see a good teacher
/ a good dog / good cheese.
Widzę
dobrych nauczycieli. Widzę
dobre psy. Widzę
dobre sery. I see good teachers
/ good dogs / good cheeses.
Slovene To je
dober učitelj / dober pes. To je
dober sir. It's a good teacher
/ a good dog / good cheese.
Vidim
dobrega učitelja / dobrega psa. Vidim
dober sir. I see a good teacher
/ a good dog / good cheese.


Even in those languages where the original three genders have been mostly lost or reduced, there is sometimes a trace of them in some parts of speech.

English: he — she — it (personal pronouns)
Spanish: el — la — lo the (definite articles)
Spanish: este — esta — esto this, this one (demonstratives)
Portuguese: todo — toda — tudo all of him/her/it (indefinite pronouns)
The Spanish neuter definite article lo, for example, is used with nouns that denote abstractions, eg. lo único "the only thing"; lo mismo "the same thing". In Portuguese, a distinction is made between está todo molhado "he's all wet", está toda molhada "she's all wet", and está tudo molhado "it's all wet" (used for unspecified objects). In terms of agreement, however, these "neuter" words count as masculine: both Spanish lo mismo and Portuguese tudo take masculine adjectives. English modifiers do not generally inflect with gender.

See , Gender in Dutch grammar, and Polish language: Grammar, for further information.
Niger-Congo languages
The Zande language distinguishes four noun classes:

Criterion Example Gloss
male human kumba man
female human 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. Auxiliary and constructed languagesMany 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 -ino, which can be used for instance to change patro "father" into patrino "mother". This particular suffix is extremely productive (there is no atomic term for "mother" in Esperanto). 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" (possessive form ĝia "its") is 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 tom-cat", katino "a she-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 "she-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 Klingon language has three genders: capable of speaking, body part and other.
See also Gender-neutrality in languages with grammatical gender: International auxiliary languages, and Gender-neutral pronoun: Constructed languages. Male and female speechSome 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, 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.[10]

For a significant period of time in the history of the ancient languages of India, after the formal language Sanskrit diverged from the popular language Prakrit, some texts recorded the speech of women in Prakrit, distinct from the Sanskrit of male speakers.[11]

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.[12]

The indigenous Australian language Yanyula has separate dialects for men and women. There are 15 noun classes, including nouns associated with food, trees and abstractions, in addition to separate classes for men and masculine things, women and feminine things. In the men's dialect, the classes for men and for masculine things have simplified to a single class, marked the same way as the women's dialect marker reserved exclusively for men.[13]

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. ClassifiersSome languages, such as Japanese, Chinese and the Tai languages, have elaborate systems of particles which classify nouns based on shape and function, but are free morphemes rather than affixes. Because the classes defined by these classifying words are not generally distinguished in other contexts, many if not most linguists take the view that they do not create grammatical genders. See Classifier, for further information List of languages by type of grammatical gendersIt may never be fully completed or, depending on its its nature, it may be that it can never be completed. However, new and revised entries in the list are always welcome.


Masculine and feminine
Albanian The neuter has almost disappeared.
Akkadian
Ancient Egyptian
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
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
Scottish Gaelic
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
Hittite
Many Native American languages, such as Navajo and Mapudungun
Sumerian
Basque: two different paradigms of noun declension are used. Adjectives and demonstratives do not show gender however.

Masculine, feminine, and neuter
Belarusian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Croatian
Czech
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
German
Greek
Gujarati
Icelandic
Kannada
Latin
Marathi
Norwegian
Old English
Old Prussian
Polish
Romanian
Russian
Sanskrit
Serbian
Serbo-Croatian
Slovak
Slovenian
Sorbian
Tamil
Ukrainian
Yiddish