Genderless language
A genderless language is a natural or constructed language that has no distinctions of grammatical gender—that is, no categories requiring morphological agreement for gender between nouns and associated pronouns, adjectives, articles, or verbs.
The notion of a "genderless language" is distinct from that of gender-neutral language, which is neutral with regard to natural gender. A discourse in a genderless language does not need to be gender-neutral ; similarly, a gender-neutral discourse does not need to take place in a genderless language.
Genderless languages do have various means to recognize natural gender, such as gender-specific words, as well as gender-specific context, both biological and cultural.
Genderless languages are listed at list of languages by type of grammatical genders. Genderless languages include all the Kartvelian languages, some Indo-European languages, all the Uralic languages, all the modern Turkic languages, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, most Austronesian languages, some Indigenous languages of the Americas, and Vietnamese.
Language contact
Through language contact, some words that are originally part of a genderless system develop a grammatical gender.There are two primary ways linguists currently classify and understand this process as occurring: the first is through language contact impacting a language independent of borrowings, and the second is explicitly in the context of loanwords or borrowings.
Language contact
Grammatical gender may arise or be lost due to language contact.A survey of gender systems in 256 languages around the world show that 112 have grammatical gender and 144 are genderless. Since the languages studied in this case were geographically close to each other, there is a significant chance that one language has influenced others. For example, the Basque language is considered a genderless language, but it has been influenced by the Spanish feminine-masculine two-gender system.