Grammatical gender

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. The values present in a given language, of which there are usually two or three, are called the genders of that language. Determiners, adjectives, and pronouns also change their form depending on the noun to which they refer.
According to one estimate, gender is used in approximately half of the world's languages.

Overview

Languages with grammatical gender usually have two to four different genders, but some are attested with up to 20.
[|Common gender divisions] include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine, and neuter; or animate and inanimate.
Depending on the language and the specific word, the assignment of grammatical gender may correlate with the noun's meaning or may be entirely arbitrary.
In a few languages, the assignment of any particular noun 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, "humanness" 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: determiners, pronouns, numerals, quantifiers, possessives, adjectives, past and passive participles, articles, verbs, adverbs, complementizers, and adpositions. 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.

Functions

Three possible functions of grammatical gender include:

In a language with explicit inflections for gender, it is easy to express gender distinctions in animate beings.
Grammatical gender "can be a valuable tool of disambiguation", rendering clarity about antecedents or homophones.
In literature, gender can be used to "animate and personify inanimate nouns". Languages with gender distinction generally have fewer cases of ambiguity concerning, for example, pronominal reference. In the English phrase "a flowerbed in the garden which I maintain", only context tells us whether the relative clause refers to the whole garden or just the flowerbed. In German, in cases where the objects in question have different grammatical gender, gender distinction prevents such ambiguity. The word for "flowerbed" is neuter, whereas that for "garden" is masculine. Hence, if a neuter relative pronoun is used, the relative clause refers to "flowerbed", and if a masculine pronoun is used, the relative clause refers to "garden". Because of this, languages with gender distinction can often use pronouns where in English a noun would have to be repeated in order to avoid confusion. It does not, however, help in cases where the words are of the same grammatical gender.

Moreover, grammatical gender may serve to distinguish homophones. It is a quite common phenomenon in language development for two phonemes 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 and are homophones, but disagree in gender: le pot vs. la peau.

Gender contrasts

Common systems of gender contrast include:

masculine–feminine gender contrast
masculine–feminine–neuter gender contrast
animate–inanimate gender contrast
common–neuter gender contrast
Masculine–feminine contrast

Nouns that denote specifically male persons are normally of masculine gender; those that denote specifically female persons are normally of feminine gender; and nouns that denote something that does not have any sex, or do not specify the sex of their referent, have come to belong to one or other of the genders, in a way that may appear arbitrary. Examples of languages with such a system include most of the modern Romance languages, the Baltic languages, the Celtic languages, some Indo-Aryan languages, and the Afroasiatic languages.

Masculine–feminine–neuter contrast

This is similar to systems with a masculine–feminine contrast, except that there is a third available gender, so nouns with sexless or unspecified-sex referents may be either masculine, feminine, or neuter. There are also certain exceptional nouns whose gender does not follow the denoted sex, such as the German Mädchen, meaning "girl", which is neuter. This is because it is actually a diminutive of "Magd" and all diminutive forms with the suffix -chen are neuter. Examples of languages with such a system include later forms of Proto-Indo-European, Sanskrit, some Germanic languages, most Slavic languages, a few Romance languages, Marathi, Latin, and Greek.

Animate–inanimate contrast

Here nouns that denote animate things generally belong to one gender, and those that denote inanimate things to another. Examples include earlier forms of Proto-Indo-European and the earliest family known to have split off from it, the extinct Anatolian languages. Modern examples include Algonquian languages such as Ojibwe.

In Northern Kurdish language, the same word can have two genders according to the context. For example, if the word dar is feminine, it means that it is a living tree, but if it is masculine, it means that it is dead, no longer living. So if one wants to refer to a certain table that is made of wood from an apple tree, one cannot use the word dar with a feminine gender, and if one wants to refer to an apple tree in a garden, one cannot use dar with a masculine gender.
Common–neuter contrast

Here a masculine–feminine–neuter system previously existed, but the distinction between masculine and feminine genders has been lost in nouns, though not in pronouns that can operate under natural gender. Thus nouns denoting people are usually of common gender, whereas other nouns may be of either gender. Examples include Danish and Swedish, and to some extent Dutch.
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 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.

Other types of division or subdivision of gender

Some gender contrasts are referred to as classes. In some of the Slavic languages, for example, within the masculine and sometimes feminine and neuter genders, there is a further division between animate and inanimate nouns—and in Polish, also sometimes between nouns denoting humans and non-humans. A human–non-human distinction is also found in Dravidian languages.

How gender contrasts can influence cognition

It has been shown that grammatical gender causes a number of cognitive effects. For example, when native speakers of gendered languages are asked to imagine an inanimate object speaking, whether its voice is male or female tends to correspond to the grammatical gender of the object in their language. This has been observed for speakers of Spanish, French, and German, among others.
Caveats of this research include the possibility of subjects "using grammatical gender as a strategy for performing the task", 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.
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, 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.