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Grammatical gender

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In linguistics, the term noun class refers to a system of categorizing nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, but counting a given noun among nouns of such or another class is often clearly conventional.

The notion of the noun class

In general, there are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into noun classes:

  • according to logical or symbolic similarities in their meaning (semantic criterium),
  • by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphology), or
  • through an arbitrary convention.

Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent.

Noun classes form a system of syntactic concordance. The fact that a noun belongs to a given class may imply the presence of:

  • agreement affixes on adjectives, pronouns, numerals etc. which are noun phrase constituents,
  • agreement affixes on the verb,
  • a special form of a pronoun which replaces the noun,
  • an affix on the noun,
  • a class-specific word in the noun phrase (or in some types of noun phrases).

In English, noun classes are expressed on nouns and pronouns alone. An example are the English words actor and actress, where the suffix -or denotes a male person or a person of unknown sex, and the suffix -ress (derived from French -rice) denotes a female person. This type of noun affixation is not very frequent in English, but quite common in languages which have the true grammatical gender, including most of the Indo-European family, to which English belongs. Modern English express noun classes through the third person singular personal pronouns he (male person), she (female person), and it (object, abstraction, or animal), and their other inflected forms. Also the choice between the relative pronoun who (persons) and which (non-persons) may be considering a way of categorizing nouns into noun classes.

When noun class is expressed on other parts of speech, besides nouns and pronouns, the language is said to have grammatical gender.

In languages without inflectional noun classes, nouns may still be extensively categorized by independent particles called noun classifiers.

Noun classes and semantics

Common criteria for defining noun classes include:

  • animate vs. inanimate (as in Ojibwe)
  • rational vs. non-rational (as in Tamil)
  • human vs. non-human
  • male vs. other
  • male human vs. other
  • masculine vs. feminine
  • masculine vs. feminine vs. neuter
  • strong vs. weak
  • augmentative vs. diminutive

A more or less discernible correlation between noun class and the shape of the respective object is found in some languages, even in the Indo-European family.

Some linguists think the Nostratic language, a hypothesized ancestor of Indo-European and other language families, had the noun classes "human", "animal", and "object".[citation needed]


Personal pronouns

Personal pronouns may have different forms based on the natural gender of their referent even in languages without grammatical gender. English distinguishes between he (male person), she (female person), and it (object, abstraction, or animal). Although he and she may be used for animals, particularly pets, by extension, and sometimes she is used to refer to countries, ships or machines, this is considered personification. In modern English, the personal pronouns essentially denote natural gender. (Compare the example of Old English, below.)

Gendered pronouns and their corresponding inflections vary considerably across languages. For example, Finnish and Hungarian differentiate between humans and inanimate objects, but not between male and female humans (even this distinction is often ignored in spoken Finnish). Both use a single pronoun for "he" and "she", hän in Finnish and ő in Hungarian.

Personal names

Personal names often have language-specific forms that identify the sex of the bearer. For example, in an English-speaking culture, John (masculine) and Joan or Jane (feminine) are gendered variants on the Hebrew name of John the Evangelist. 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).

For Russian sex-related tradition of personal naming, see Names in Russian Empire, Soviet Union and CIS countries.

Grammatical gender

The term gender refers to a noun class system composed with 2, 3, or 4 classes. Genders are a special instance of noun classes.

In languages with genders, the gender is a selective category for noun. It means that all nouns must be assigned to a gender, and thus all nouns may be divided into groups, considering their gender. The word "gender" derives from Latin genus, which is also the root of genre, and originally meant "kind", so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning. For instance, the Polish word ręcznik ‘towel’ is of masculine gender, encyklopedia ‘encyclopaedia’ is of feminine gender, and krzesło ‘chair’ is of neuter gender.

A language has grammatical gender when changes in the gender of a noun necessarily induce morphological changes in adjectives and other parts of speech (such as verbs) that refer to that noun. For adjective and some other inflecting words, gender is an inflected category. It means that (in languages with genders) adjectives are inflected by genders, or change their forms depending on gender of the noun to which they refer. In yet other words, when a noun belongs to a certain gender, other parts of speech that refer to that noun have to be inflected to be in the same class. These obligatory changes are called gender agreement.

In Polish, the adjective which means ‘big, large’ has three forms (in nominative singular), one for masculine, one for feminine, and one for neuter gender: duży ręcznik ‘big towel’, duża encyklopedia ‘big encyclopaedia’, duże krzesło ‘big chair’.

Consider the sentences The man is tall and The woman is tall. In English, the only difference between them are the nouns "man/woman", thus the grammatical gender is not present in English. In Spanish, by contrast, one says El hombre es alto and La mujer es alta, respectively. Along with the change in the words for "man" and "woman" (hombre vs. mujer), there is also a change in the article (el, la) and the adjective (alto, alta).

In French the sentences Il est un grand acteur and Elle est une grande actrice mean ‘He is a great actor’ and ‘She is a great actress’, respectively. Not only do the nouns (acteur, actrice) and the pronouns (il, elle) denote the gender of their referent, but so do the articles (un, une) and the adjectives (grand, grande). This never occurs in Modern English (with the exception of blond/blonde), which therefore does not have grammatical gender. Old English had grammatical gender (example below), but with time its gender inflections were simplified, began to be confused with one another, and eventually merged.

Only when a language exhibits gender agreement do we say that it has grammatical genders. Thus grammatical gender need not exist, and in fact it is not present in Modern English. This was not always the case, however. Curzan illustrates gender agreement in Old English with the following "highly contrived" example:

Seo brade lind wæs tilu and ic hire lufod.
(Literal translation:) That broad shield was good and I loved her.

Since the noun lind (shield) is grammatically feminine, the pronoun seo (the, that) and the adjectives brade (broad) and tilu (good), which refer to lind, must also appear in their feminine forms, as well as the pronoun hire (her), which adopts the grammatical gender of its referent. This example illustrates the important fact that, in languages with grammatical gender, every noun must have a gender, even the name of an inanimate object like "shield", but the gender assigned to a noun isn't always what one might expect from the tripartite classification into "masculine", "feminine" and "neuter".

For comparison, in Modern English the sentence would be:

That broad shield was good and I loved it.

Here, the shield is understood as a sexless object, and therefore designated by the neuter pronoun it. There is only a lexical marking of gender, so Modern English lacks grammatical gender. This is unusual for an Indo-European language (another example is Afrikaans), but not uncommon in other language families. Uralic, Altaic, Sino-Tibetan languages, for instance, usually do not have grammatical gender.

Grammatical genders may be marked in other ways. On the whole, gender is not marked in Welsh, both on the noun, and, often, on the adjective. However, it has one unusual feature, that of initial mutation, where the first consonant changes to another in certain conditions. Gender is one of the factors that can cause mutation, especially the soft mutation. For instance, the word merch means ‘girl’ or ‘daughter’. However 'the girl' is y ferch. This only occurs with feminine nouns; masculine nouns remain unchanged after the definite article (for example mab — 'son', y mab — 'the son'). Adjectives are affected by gender in a similar way: ‘the big girl’ is y ferch fawr, but ‘the big son’ is y mab mawr.

Natural gender vs. grammatical gender

Natural gender refers to natural characteristics of a being, object, or concept, as opposed to the grammatical classification of the noun which designates it. For example, in languages where nouns are classified as either "masculine", "feminine" or "neuter", natural gender is the state of being either "male person", "female person", or "neither". In languages where nouns are classified as "animate" or "inanimate", the natural genders are the categories "human or animal" and "other". The word "natural" should be understood in a broad sense, here. Natural gender can be the biological sex of a living being, or the social or personal gender identity of a person, or some other natural characteristic not related to sexuality.

Grammatical gender should be distinguished from natural gender, since the two coincide only partially. Namely, most words describing male and female beings are of masculine and feminine gender respectively, if such genders exist. For example, the Polish noun mężczyzna ‘man’ is of masculine, kobieta ‘woman’ is of feminine, and dziecko ‘child, baby’ is of neuter gender. However, in general, grammatical gender has little or no relation to the natural gender of the referent, and it may often be assigned to nouns in a way independent of their meaning. Especially, the gender assigned to animals, abstractions, and inanimate objects, such as "Sun" and "Moon", is arbitrary. Thus, in Latin and Romance languages the word Sol ‘Sun’ is masculine and the word Luna ‘Moon’ is feminine, but, in German and Germanic languages in general, the opposite occurs. There is nothing objective about the Moon or the Sun which makes them intrinsically masculine or feminine. Moreover, two words denoting the same concept can differ in gender in closely related languages, and also within one language. For example, in the Russian language the word луна ‘Moon’ is feminine while its Polish counterpart, księżyc, is masculine. The Russian word картофель ‘potato’ is masculine, while картошка ‘spud’ is feminine [1]. The gender of such words is merely a convention.

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.

Biological sex and sociological gender may also be covered by grammatical gender, therefore both dziewczę, ‘girl’ in Polish, and Mädchen, ‘girl’ in German, are treated grammatically as neuter. The German example may be explained by the fact that the word was constructed as the diminutive of Magd ‘maid’ (archaic nowadays), and diminutive suffixes such as -chen conventionally place nouns in the neuter gender (the explanation for the Polish form is analogical). But not all such instances may be explained: another interesting German example is the noun Weib, "woman", which is neuter, not feminine.

Gender and morphology

Even languages without grammatical gender can have quite pervasive lexical marking of natural gender. A notable example is the suffix -ino, in Esperanto, which can be used to change patro, ‘father’ into patrino, ‘mother’. This particular suffix is extremely productive (there is no atomic term for ‘mother’ in Esperanto), leading some people to the erroneous assumption that it is a grammatical rather than a lexical gender marker.

Nouns that end in some other vowel are assigned a gender either according to etymology, or by an arbitrary convention. Apart from words that refer to human beings and some animals, there is no semantic value to the labels "masculine" and "feminine". The overlap between grammatical gender and morphology may, however, not be complete: problema (problem) is masculine (though this is for etymological reasons), and radio (radio station) is feminine (because it's a shortening of estación de radio, a phrase whose head is the feminine noun estación).

In Spanish, the suffix -o is characteristic of masculine nouns and the suffix -a is characteristic of feminine nouns. Thus, niño means ‘boy’, and niña means ‘girl’. This allows neologisms to be readily created, by analogy: given the noun empresario ‘businessman’, it was straightforward to make the new noun empresaria for ‘businesswoman’. This kind of gender switch can also have more subtle uses, such as making interchangeable nouns like fruta ‘fruit’ or fruto ‘fruit’ that have no real sex connotation. Since nouns that refer to male persons often end in -o and nouns that refer to female persons usually end in -a, most other nouns that end in -o are also treated as masculine, and most nouns that end in -a are treated as feminine, regardless of their meaning.

Morphology may override meaning, in some cases. In German, nouns ending in the nominalizing suffix -ung are grammatically feminine, and diminutives with the endings -lein and -chen (meaning little, young) are neuter, so that Mädchen (girl) and Fräulein (young woman) are neuter. 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 "woman" also being neuter), but the feminine gender remains for some words denoting objects. In Spanish, 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.

It is however worth to be emphasized that there are no true "gender markers" in any of the Indo-European languages, also in Spanish, in which plenty of nouns have neither -o nor -a suffix, and despite of it their grammatical gender is fixed and often not related to their meaning. The same situation is in Polish, where masculine nouns have often no ending in nominative singular, feminine nouns have the ending -a, and neuter nouns have the ending -o, -e, or -ę. Besides, there exists a numerous group of nouns which does not obey these rules, ex. mężczyzna ‘man’ is masculine (not feminine), książę ‘prince’ is masculine (not neuter), kość ‘bone’ is feminine (not masculine, cf. similar gość ‘guest’ which is masculine), etc.

English has a few lexical markers of gender in nouns, which however are seldom used, and often with humorous intent. An example is the suffix -ette (of French provenance) in rockette, from rocket.

Gender and convention

Not all languages with noun classes exhibit distinctive markings for each class. 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 nothing intrinsic about a table makes it masculine, as in German Tisch, or neuter, as in 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 German der Tisch - with der being the definite article for masculine singular nominative - and Norwegian bordet - with the suffix -et being the denoter of definite neuter singular, though an article det is used, too, when an adjective is linked to the noun, producing "the good table": det gode bordet).

Indeterminate gender

In languages with masculine and feminine genders, 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".

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 can still be described as a group of "actors".

The dummy pronoun of two-gender languages with masculine and feminine is usually the default masculine third person singular, as well. For example, the French sentence for "It is raining" is Il pleut, whose literal meaning is "He rains". There are some exceptions: the corresponding sentence in Welsh is Mae hi'n bwrw glaw, literally "She is raining".

Animals and gender

The relation between natural gender and lexical or grammatical gender is often different for animals from what it is for human beings. In Spanish, 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). 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, French chat (male cat) and chatte (female cat).

Noun classes in specific linguistic families

Afro-Asiatic languages

Afro-Asiatic languages typically have two genders, masculine and feminine, and inflect verbs for gender.

Algonquian languages

The Ojibwe language and other members of the Algonquian languages distinguish between animate and inanimate classes. Some sources argue that the distinction is between things which are powerful and things which are not. All living things, as well as sacred things and things connected to the Earth are considered powerful and belong to the animate class. Still, the assignment is somewhat arbitrary, as "raspberry" is animate, but "strawberry" is inanimate.

Athabaskan languages

In Navajo (Southern Athabaskan) nouns are classified according to their animacy, shape, and consistency. Morphologically, however, the distinctions are not expressed on the nouns themselves, but on the verbs of which the nouns are the subject or direct object. For example, in the sentence Shi’éé’ tsásk’eh bikáa’gi dah siłtsooz "My shirt is lying on the bed", the verb siłtsooz "lies" is used because the subject shi’éé’ "my shirt" is a flat, flexible object. In the sentence Siziiz tsásk’eh bikáa’gi dah silá "My belt is lying on the bed", the verb silá "lies" is used because the subject siziiz "my belt" is a slender, flexible object. See Navajo language#Classificatory Verbs for more discussion.

Koyukon (Northern Athabaskan) has a more intricate system of classification. Like Navajo, it has classificatory verb stems that classify nouns according to animacy, shape, and consistency. However, in addition to these verb stems, Koyukon verbs have what are called gender prefixes that further classify nouns. That is, Koyukon has two different systems that classify nouns: (a) a classificatory verb system and (b) a gender system. To illustrate, the verb stem -tonh is used for enclosed objects. When -tonh is combined with different gender prefixes, it can result in daaltonh which refers to objects enclosed in boxes or etltonh which refers to objects enclosed in bags.

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

Of the 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: 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 human male/human female/non-human 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.

An entire website has been devoted to exploring the possibilities of inanimate genders in Caucasian languages.

Indo-European languages

Many linguists think the earliest stages of Proto-Indo-European had two genders, animate and inanimate, as did Hittite, but the inanimate later split into neuter and feminine[citation needed], originating the traditional three genders which most ancient Indo-European languages inherited. Many of its modern descendants have kept the three-way classification. Such is the case of most Slavic languages, classical Latin, Sanskrit, ancient Greek and modern Greek, for instance. Other Indo-European languages reduced the number of genders to two, either by losing the neuter (like the Celtic languages and most Romance 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 lost grammatical gender altogether. In contrast, Polish has no less than five genders: masculine personal, masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine and neuter.

Even in those where the original three genders have been mostly lost or reduced, however, there may still be a trace of gender in some parts of speech. Thus, Modern English has kept the three-way division of personal pronouns into he (masculine), she (feminine) and it (neuter). Spanish distinguishes between the definite articles el (masculine), la (feminine) and lo (neuter), where the latter designates abstractions (e.g. lo único ‘the only thing’; lo mismo ‘the same thing’). Portuguese has a semantically neuter indefinite pronoun, tudo (‘everything’, used without a definite referent); cf. todo, masculine (e.g. todo livro ‘every book’), toda, feminine (e.g. toda salada ‘every salad’). In terms of agreement, however, these "neuter" words count as masculine: both el and lo take masculine adjectives in Spanish, as do todo and tudo in Portuguese. And, in English, no determiners are ever inflected to agree with he, she, or it.

Exceptionally for a Romance language, Romanian has preserved all three genders of Latin, but the neuter is now a combination of the other two, in the sense that neuter nouns in the singular behave like masculine nouns, while in the plural they behave like feminine nouns; as a consequence, adjectives, pronouns, and pronominal adjectives only have two forms, both in the singular and in the plural. See also Loss of the neuter gender in Romance languages.

Indo-Pacific languages

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.

Niger-Congo languages

Niger-Congo languages can have ten or more noun classes, defined according to non-sexual criteria. Certain nominal classes are reserved for humans. The Fula language has a noun class reserved for liquids. According to Steven Pinker, the Kivunjo language has 16 noun classes including classes for precise locations and for general locales, classes for clusters or pairs of objects and classes for the objects that come in pairs or clusters, and classes for abstract qualities.

Bantu languages

According to Carl Meinhof, the Bantu languages have a total of 22 noun classes called nominal classes (this notion was introduced by W.H.J.Bleek). While no single language is known to express all of them, all of them have at least 10 noun classes. For example, by Meinhof's numbering, Swahili has 15 classes, and Sesotho has 18.

Specialists in Bantu emphasize that there is a clear difference between genders (such as known from Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European) and nominal classes (such as known from Niger-Congo). Languages with nominal casses divide nouns formally on the base of hyperonomic meanings. The category of nominal class replaces not only the category of gender, but also the categories of number and case.

Critics of the Meinhof's approach notice that his numbering system of nominal classes counts singular and plural numbers of the same noun as belonging to separate classes (see Sesotho language for examples). This seems to them to be inconsistent with the way other languages are traditionally considered, where number is orthogonal to gender (according to the critics, a Meinhof-style analysis would give Ancient Greek 9 genders!). If one follows broader linguistic tradition and counts singular and plural as belonging to the same class, then Swahili has 8 or 9 noun classes and Sesotho has 11.

This critique does not seem to be well-founded, though, and the Meinhof's numbering is obligatorily applied in all scientific works. There are no, or very little, facts which would allow us to speak about the category of number in Bantu, and "singular" and "plural" classes are not paired strictly. For instance, in Swahili the word rafiki ‘friend’ belongs to the class 9 and its "plural form" is marafiki of the class 6, even if most nouns of the 9 class have the plural of the class 10. Which is more, the difference between mtoto (‘child’, class 1) and watoto (‘children’, class 2) does not seem to be more than between mtoto and kitoto (‘little child’, class 7). Both the making of the plural and the diminutive require a class change. Adding the locative suffix -ni also requires a class change: nyumba yangu nzuri means ‘my pretty house’ (cl. 9) while nyumbani mwangu mzuri means ‘in my pretty house’ (cl. 18).

Here is a complete list of nominal classes in Swahili:

Class number Prefix Typical meaning
1 m-, mw-, mu- singular: persons
2 wa-, w- plural: persons (a plural counterpart of class 1)
3 m-, mw-, mu- singular: plants
4 mi-, my- plural: plants (a plural counterpart of class 3)
5 ji-, j-, 0- singular: fruits
6 ma-, m- plural: fruits (a plural counterpart of class 5, 9, 11, seldom 1)
7 ki-, ch- singular: things
8 vi-, vy- plural: things (a plural counterpart of class 7)
9 n-, ny-, m-, 0- singular: animals, things
10 n-, ny-, m-, 0- plural: animals, things (a plural counterpart of class 9 and 11)
11 u-, w-, uw- singular: no clear semantics
15 ku-, kw- verbal nouns
16 pa- locative meanings: close to something
17 ku- indefinite locative or directive meaning
18 mu-, m- locative meanings: inside something

0- means no prefixes, note also that some classes are homonymic (esp. 9 and 10). The Proto-Bantu class 12 disappeared in Swahili, class 13 merged with 7, and 14 with 11.

Class prefixes appear also on adjectives and verbs, e.g.:

Kitabu kikubwa kinaanguka.

(cl.7-book cl.7-big cl.7-PRESENT-fall)

‘The big book falls.’

The class markers which appear on the adjectives and verbs may differ from the noun prefixes:

Mtoto wangu alikinunua kitabu.

(cl.1-child cl.1-my cl.1-PAST-cl.7-buy cl.7-book)

‘My child bought a book.’

In this example, the verbal prefix a- and the pronominal prefix wa- are in concordance with the noun prefix m-: they all express class 1 despite of their different forms.


Zande

The Zande language distinguishes four noun classes:

Criterion Example Translation
human (male) kumba man
human (female) 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.

Noun classes in specific languages

More than three grammatical genders/noun classes

Notes

  1. ^ Grammatical gender in the Russian language

Bibliography

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  • Meissner, Antje & Anne Storch (eds.) (2000) Nominal classification in African languages, Institut für Afrikanische Sprachwissenschaften, Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. ISBN 3-89645-014-X.
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  • Pinker, Steven (1994) The Language Instinct, William Morrow and Company.
  • van Berkum, J.J.A. (1996) The psycholinguistics of grammatical gender: Studies in language comprehension and production. Doctoral Dissertation, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Nijmegen, Netherlands: Nijmegen University Press (ISBN 90-373-0321-8).
  • Мячина, Е.Н. (1987) Краткий грамматический очерк языка суахили. In: Суахили-русский словарь. Kamusi ya Kiswahili-Kirusi. Москва. "Русский Язык".

Other references

See also

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