List of languages by type of grammatical genders: Difference between revisions
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*[[Lojban]]<ref>http://mw.lojban.org/papri/Questions/en</ref> |
*[[Lojban]]<ref>http://mw.lojban.org/papri/Questions/en</ref> |
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*[[Toki Pona]] |
*[[Toki Pona]] |
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[[Creole language|'''Creoles''']] |
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* [[Sango language|Sango]]<ref name=":0" /> |
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'''[[Language isolate|Isolates]]''' |
'''[[Language isolate|Isolates]]''' |
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*[[Zuni language|Zuni]]<ref name=":0" /> |
*[[Zuni language|Zuni]]<ref name=":0" /> |
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'''[[Indo-European languages|Indo-European]]''' |
'''[[Indo-European languages|Indo-European]]''' |
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*[[Armenian language|Armenian]] |
*[[Armenian language|Armenian]] |
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*[[Bengali language|Bengali]] |
*[[Bengali language|Bengali]] |
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*[[English language|English]] (English has three gendered pronouns, but no longer has grammatical gender in the sense of noun class distinctions.) |
*[[English language|English]] (English has three gendered pronouns, but no longer has grammatical gender in the sense of noun class distinctions.) |
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*[[Konkani language|Konkani]] |
*[[Konkani language|Konkani]] |
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*[[Kurdish Language|Kurdish]] (Central and Southern Dialects only.) |
*[[Kurdish Language|Kurdish]] (Central and Southern Dialects only.) |
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*[[Nepali language|Nepali]] (Has gendered pronouns but no grammatical genders.) |
*[[Nepali language|Nepali]] (Has gendered pronouns but no grammatical genders.) |
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*[[Odia language|Odia]] |
*[[Odia language|Odia]] |
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*[[Malayalam]] ([[Dravidian languages|Dravidian]]) |
*[[Malayalam]] ([[Dravidian languages|Dravidian]]) |
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*[[Manchu language|Manchu]] ([[Tungusic languages|Tungusic]]) used [[vowel harmony]] in gender inflections. |
*[[Manchu language|Manchu]] ([[Tungusic languages|Tungusic]]) used [[vowel harmony]] in gender inflections. |
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*[[Mandarin Chinese|Mandarin]] ([[Sino-Tibetan languages|Sino-Tibetan]])<ref name=":0" /> |
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*[[Miwok languages|Miwok]] ([[Yok-Utian languages|Yok-Utian]])<ref name=":0" /> |
*[[Miwok languages|Miwok]] ([[Yok-Utian languages|Yok-Utian]])<ref name=":0" /> |
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*[[Mongolian language|Mongolian]] ([[Mongolic languages|Mongolic]]) |
*[[Mongolian language|Mongolian]] ([[Mongolic languages|Mongolic]]) |
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*[[Murle language|Murle]] ([[Nilo-Saharan languages|Nilo-Saharan]])<ref name=":0" /> |
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*[[Nez Perce language|Nez Perce]] ([[Plateau Penutian languages|Plateau Penutian]])<ref name=":0" /> |
*[[Nez Perce language|Nez Perce]] ([[Plateau Penutian languages|Plateau Penutian]])<ref name=":0" /> |
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*[[Pomo language|Pomo]] ([[Hokan languages|Hokan]])<ref name=":0" /> |
*[[Pomo language|Pomo]] ([[Hokan languages|Hokan]])<ref name=":0" /> |
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Revision as of 20:42, 12 June 2021
This article lists languages depending on their use of grammatical gender.
No grammatical gender
Certain language families, such as the Austronesian, Turkic and Uralic language families, usually have no grammatical genders (see genderless language). Many indigenous American languages (across language families) have no grammatical gender.[1]
- Bikol
- Carolinian
- Chamoru
- Cebuano
- Filipino
- Gilbertese
- Ilokano
- Javanese
- Malagasy[1]
- Māori[1]
- Marshallese
- Nauruan
- Niuean
- Palauan
- Rapa Nui
- Samoan
- Sundanese
- Tagalog
- Tahitian
- Tetum
- Tongan
- Tuvaluan
- Visayan
- Esperanto (Esperanto has three gendered pronouns, and separate endings to distinguish natural gender, although there is a movement for gender reform in Esperanto.)[2]
- Ido[3]
- Lingua Franca Nova
- Lojban[4]
- Toki Pona
- Afrikaans (Afrikaans has three gendered pronouns, but not other grammatical gender, very similar to English.)
- Haitian Creole
- Mauritian Creole
- Sango[1]
- Armenian
- Bengali
- English (English has three gendered pronouns, but no longer has grammatical gender in the sense of noun class distinctions.)
- Konkani
- Kurdish (Central and Southern Dialects only.)
- Nepali (Has gendered pronouns but no grammatical genders.)
- Odia
- Ossetic
- Persian
- Scots
- Azerbaijani
- Bashkir
- Chuvash[1]
- Crimean Tatar
- Gagauz
- Karachay-Balkar
- Karakalpak
- Kazakh
- Khakas
- Khalaj[1]
- Kumyk
- Kyrgyz
- Nogai
- Salar
- Shor
- Tatar
- Turkish
- Turkmen
- Tuvinian
- Uyghur
- Uzbek[1]
- Yakut
Other
- Aleut (Eskimo-Aleut)[1]
- Carib (Cariban)[1]
- Canela (Macro-Jê)[1]
- Georgian (Kartvelian)
- Greenlandic (Eskimo-Aleut)
- Guarani (Tupian)[1]
- Japanese (Japonic)
- Karuk (Hokan)[1]
- Khmer (Austroasiatic)[1]
- Korean (Koreanic)
- Lao (Kra-Dai)
- Malayalam (Dravidian)
- Manchu (Tungusic) used vowel harmony in gender inflections.
- Mandarin (Sino-Tibetan)[1]
- Miwok (Yok-Utian)[1]
- Mongolian (Mongolic)
- Murle (Nilo-Saharan)[1]
- Nez Perce (Plateau Penutian)[1]
- Pomo (Hokan)[1]
- Rama (Chibchan)[1]
- Southern Quechua (Quechuan)
- Tamil (Dravidian; has three gendered pronouns, but no grammatical gender)
- Wichita (Caddoan)[1]
- Yurok (Algic)[1]
Noun classifiers
Some languages without noun class may have noun classifiers instead. This is common in East Asian languages.
- American Sign Language
- Bengali (Indo-European)
- Burmese
- Modern Chinese (Sino-Tibetan; modern written Chinese (see Chinese pronouns) has gendered pronouns just like English, but doesn’t have grammatical gender in the sense of noun class distinctions.)
- Fijian (Austronesian)
- Hawaiian (Austronesian)[5] (There is a noun class system but it is flexible and determined by how the arguments in a statement interact with each other. Therefore, it doesn't constitute a grammatical gender. For example, a house is kino ʻō (o class) because you can go into it so "your house" would be "kou hale." However, if you build the house yourself, the possessive would take the kino ʻā form "kāu hale.")
- Indonesian (Austronesian)
- Japanese
- Khmer
- Hmong
- Korean
- Malay (Austronesian)
- Persian (Indo-European)
- Thai
- Vietnamese
Masculine and feminine
- Akkadian
- Ancient Egyptian
- Amharic
- Arabic (many modern variants have merged the feminine and masculine plural pronouns, adjectives and verb conjugations into common plural)
- Aramaic
- Coptic
- Hebrew
- Maltese
- Oromo
- Tamazight (Berber)
- Albanian - the neuter has almost disappeared.
- Breton (Brythonic)
- Catalan - although it has the pronoun "ho" which substitutes antecedents with no gender, like a subordinate clause or a neuter demonstrative ("això", "allò"). For example: "vol això" (he wants this)→"ho vol" (he wants it), or "ha promès que vindrà" (he has promised he will come)→"ho ha promès" (he has promised it).
- Cornish (Brythonic)
- Corsican
- French
- Friulan
- Galician (with some remains of neuter in the demonstratives isto (this here), iso (this there/that here) and aquilo (that there), which can also be pronouns)
- Gujarati language
- Hindi
- Irish (Goidelic)
- Italian - there is a trace of the neuter in some nouns and personal pronouns. E.g.: singular l'uovo, il dito; plural le uova, le dita ('the egg(s)', 'the finger(s)'), although singulars of the type dito and uovo and their agreements coincide in form with masculine grammatical gender and the plurals conform to feminine grammatical morphology.
- Kashmiri
- Kurdish (only Northern dialect and only in singular nouns and pronouns, not in plural and not in adjectives or verbs; Central or Southern dialects have lost grammatical gender altogether)
- Ladin
- Latvian
- Lithuanian - there is a neuter gender for all declinable parts of speech (most adjectives, pronouns, numerals, participles), except for nouns, but it has a very limited set of forms.
- Manx (Goidelic)
- Occitan
- Pashto - the neuter has almost disappeared.
- Portuguese - there is a trace of the neuter in the demonstratives (isto/isso/aquilo) and some indefinite pronouns.
- Punjabi (see also Punjabi dialects)
- Romani
- Sardinian
- Scottish Gaelic (Goidelic)
- Sicilian
- Spanish - there is a neuter of sorts, though generally expressed only with the definite article lo, used with adjectives denoting abstract categories: lo bueno, or when referring to an unknown object eso.
- Urdu (Lashkari)
- Venetian
- Welsh (Brythonic)
- Zazaki
Common and neuter
In these languages, animate nouns are predominantly of common gender, while inanimate nouns may be of either gender.
- Danish (Danish has four gendered pronouns, but only two grammatical genders in the sense of noun classes.)
- Dutch (The masculine and the feminine have merged into a common gender in standard Dutch, but a distinction is still made by some when using pronouns, and in Southern-Dutch varieties. See Gender in Dutch grammar.)
- Filipino
- (West) Frisian
- Hittite (The Hittite "common" gender contains nouns that are either masculine or feminine in other Indo-European languages, while the "neuter" gender continues the inherited Indo-European neuter gender.)
- Norwegian (In the Bergen dialect, and in some sociolects of Oslo.)
- Swedish (The distinction between masculine and feminine still exists for people and some animals. Some dialects retain all three genders for all nouns.) (Swedish has four gendered pronouns, but only two grammatical genders in the sense of noun classes.)
Animate and inanimate
- Basque (the declension of the nominal phrase in the locative cases differs depending on the animacy of the referent; a different and unrelated masculine/feminine distinction is present in the verbal allocutive agreement)
- Biak - One of the few Austronesian languages with grammatical gender. The distinction is only maintained in the plural, additionally making Biak a rare exception to Greenberg's linguistical universal 45.[6]
- Elamite
- Georgian - different verbs are used in various cases (to put, to take, to have etc.), while referring to animate or inanimate objects.
- Many Native American languages, including most languages of the Algic, Siouan[7][8] and Uto-Aztecan language families, as well as isolates such as Mapudungun
- Middle Korean
- Sumerian
- Chukotko-Kamchatkan
In many such languages, what is commonly termed "animacy" may in fact be more accurately described as a distinction between human and non-human, rational and irrational, "socially active" and "socially passive" etc.
Masculine, feminine, and neuter
Most of these languages are Indo-European. Proto-Indo-European originally had two genders (animate and inanimate), and later the animate split into masculine and feminine, and the inanimate became neuter.[9]
- Asturian - Masculine, feminine and neuter for uncountable nouns.
- Belarusian
- Bulgarian *
- 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. In South-Dutch (Flemish) spoken language all articles, possessives and demonstratives differentiate between masculine and feminine: see gender in Dutch grammar.
- Faroese
- Gaulish
- German
- Greek - in the Attic dialect of Ancient Greek, neuter plurals are treated like singulars in verbal agreement.
- Gujarati
- Icelandic
- Kannada
- Ket[10]
- Latin
- Limburgish
- Low German
- Luxembourgish
- Macedonian
- Marathi
- Norwegian - the three-gender system is widely used throughout the country, except in the Bergen dialect (some sociolects in Oslo lack it as well), where the dialect allows feminine nouns to be given the corresponding masculine inflections or do not use the feminine gender at all.
- Old English
- Old Irish
- Old Persian
- Old Prussian
- Pennsylvania German
- Polish *
- Romanian - the neuter gender (called neutru or sometimes ambigen in Romanian) has no separate forms of its own; neuter nouns behave like masculine nouns in the singular, and feminine in the plural. This behavior is seen in the form of agreeing adjectives and replacing pronouns. See Romanian nouns.
- Russian *
- Sanskrit
- Serbo-Croatian *
- Slovak *
- Slovene *
- Sorbian
- Swedish - as in Dutch, the masculine and the feminine have merged into a common gender in standard Swedish. But many dialects, mainly in Dalecarlia, Ostrobothnia (Finland) and northern Sweden, have preserved three genders in spoken language.
- Telugu
- Ukrainian *
- Yiddish
Note: in Slavic languages marked with an asterisk (*), traditionally only masculine, feminine and neuter genders are recognized, with animacy as a separate category for the masculine and feminine (in East Slavic languages) or masculine only (elsewhere); the actual situation is similar to Czech.
More than three grammatical genders
- Burushaski: masculine, feminine, animals/countable nouns and inanimates/uncountable nouns/abstracts/fluids
- Chechen: 6 classes[11] (masculine, feminine and 4 other miscellaneous classes)
- Czech and Slovak: Masculine animate, Masculine inanimate, Feminine, Neuter (traditionally, only masculine, feminine and neuter genders are recognized, with animacy as a separate category for the masculine).
- Polish: Masculine personal, Masculine animate, Masculine inanimate, Feminine, Neuter (traditionally, only masculine, feminine and neuter genders are recognized).
- Pama–Nyungan languages including Dyirbal and other Australian languages have gender systems such as: Masculine, feminine (see Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things), vegetable and neuter.[12][13] (Some linguists[which?] do not regard the noun class system of this language as grammatical gender.)[citation needed]
- Many Australian languages have a system of gender superclassing in which membership in one gender can mean membership in another.[14]
- Kannada: Originally had 9 gender pronouns but only 3 exist at present. [citation needed]
- Zande: Masculine, feminine, animate, and inanimate.
- Bantu languages have many noun classes.[15]
- Rwanda-Rundi family of languages (including Kinyarnwanda,[16] Kirundi,[17] and Ha[18]): 16 noun classes grouped in 10 pairs.
- Ganda: ten classes called simply Class I to Class X and containing all sorts of arbitrary groupings but often characterised as people, long objects, animals, miscellaneous objects, large objects and liquids, small objects, languages, pejoratives, infinitives, mass nouns
- Shona: 20 noun classes (singular and plural are considered separate classes)
- Swahili: 18 noun classes (singular and plural are considered separate classes)
- Tuyuca: Tuyuca has 50–140 noun classes.[19][unreliable source]
- Sepik languages: Sepik languages all distinguish between at least masculine and feminine genders, but some distinguish three or more genders.[20]
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al Corbett, Greville G. (2013). Dryer, Matthew S.; Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). "Number of Genders". The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. – via WALS.
- ^ http://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/105/Esperanto16.pdf
- ^ http://idolinguo.org.uk/bgrammar.htm
- ^ http://mw.lojban.org/papri/Questions/en
- ^ Elbert, Samuel H.; Pukui, Mary Kawena (1979). Hawaiian Grammar. University of Hawaii Press - HONOLULU. pp. 136–144. ISBN 9780824824891.
- ^ van den Heuvel, Wilco (2006). Biak: Description of an Austronesian Language of Papua. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, fn. p. 100.
- ^ https://web.archive.org/web/20070904225112/http://www.latrobe.edu.au/rclt/StaffPages/aikhenvald%2Bdownloads/ClassifiersELL2published.pdf
- ^ Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, 1996. p.437
- ^ Luraghi, Silvia (2011). "The origin of the Proto-Indo-European gender system: Typological considerations" (PDF). Folia Linguistica. 45/2. Mouton de Gruyter – Societas Linguistica Europa: 435–464. doi:10.1515/flin.2011.016. ISSN 0165–4004.
{{cite journal}}: Check|issn=value (help) - ^ "Ket – Ethnologue". Ethnologue. Retrieved 20 August 2019.
- ^ Awde, Nicholas; Galaev, Muhammad (2014-05-22). Chechen-English English-Chechen Dictionary and Phrasebook. ISBN 9781136802331.
- ^ Kibort, Anna; Corbett, Greville G. (2010-08-19). Features: Perspectives on a Key Notion in Linguistics. ISBN 9780199577743.
- ^ https://scholar.harvard.edu/mpolinsky/files/Dyirbal.pdf
- ^ https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_11037/rpopt.pdf?Expires=1495704752&Signature=f5dJsIP1bJ4D3ICf4UTKiBehPDgx4Q8AUj~SIe4tL1-2n-fkAHl7fKtYDxYQ918mu0UUKM9OfGxw~DC3I-T~QRiGWHUhtl~RnJ4hH5TZNFO7RFouVpXeaBlRRd1fT0t8I7sTswoT9qjwZ3zqV3O-fGfOHUoblz4Aayl7U5IsPGK6sXpacpkketqOf~bXayFbg9C~kj~QJkm-naqsAdVeQkngzUw1~hymGbd2rNcVnGXxeq4g6S04aoF2idHVfE8JAlJ1ov6~MG83dp6BhqtRRzCxV396TyyUjc4AdHqUZrsvchvpYnjPBqNH5MKMfKD8CKGDG7Fgtf9fBgTAiBz2qg__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJKNBJ4MJBJNC6NLQ
- ^ Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (2016-09-05). How Gender Shapes the World. ISBN 9780191035692.
- ^ https://www.africa.upenn.edu/NEH/rwlanguage.htm
- ^ Ndayiragije, Juvénal; Nikiema, Emmanuel; Bhatt, Parth (2012). "The Augment in Kirundi: When Syntax Meets Phonology" (PDF). Selected Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference on African Linguistics. University of Toronto. Retrieved 2019-04-03.
- ^ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324224169_The_Ha_Language_of_Tanzania_Grammar_Texts_and_Vocabulary
- ^ "Difficult Languages: Tongue Twisters - In search of the world's hardest language". The Economist. 2009-12-17. Retrieved 2009-12-23.
- ^ Foley, William A. (2018). "The Languages of the Sepik-Ramu Basin and Environs". In Palmer, Bill (ed.). The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide. The World of Linguistics. Vol. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 197–432. ISBN 978-3-11-028642-7.