Grammatical gender

In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called gender;[1] the values present in a given language (of which there are usually two or three) are called the genders of that language.

This article is about grammatical rules of agreement with nouns. For uses of language associated with gender, see Language and gender. For methods of minimizing the use of gendered forms, see Gender-neutral language. For other uses, see Gender (disambiguation).
Grammatical features
Related to nouns
Related to verbs
General features
Syntax relationships
Semantics
Phenomena

Whereas some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", others use different definitions for each; many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to sex. Gender systems are used in approximately one half of the world's languages.[2] According to one definition: "Genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behaviour of associated words."[3][4][5]

Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Grammatical gender, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.