List of languages by type of grammatical genders

This article lists languages depending on their approach to grammatical gender.

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

No grammatical gender

Certain language families, such as the Austronesian, Turkic and Uralic language families, usually have no grammatical genders (see genderless language).

Noun classifiers

Some languages without noun class may have noun classifiers instead. This is common in East Asian languages.

Masculine and feminine
  • Albanian - the neuter has almost disappeared.
  • Akkadian
  • Ancient Egyptian
  • Amharic
  • Arabic (many modern variants have merged the feminine and masculine plural pronouns, adjectives and verb conjugations into common plural)
  • Aramaic
  • 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).
  • Coptic
  • 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
  • Hebrew
  • 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.
  • Kurdish (only Northern dialect; Central or Southern dialects have lost grammatical gender)
  • 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.
  • Maltese
  • Manx (Goidelic)
  • Occitan
  • Oromo language
  • 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.
  • Tamazight (Berber)
  • 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

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

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[9] (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.[10][11] (Some linguists do not regard the noun class system of this language as grammatical gender.)
    • Many Australian languages have a system of gender superclassing in which membership in one gender can mean membership in another.[12]
  • Kannada: Originally had 9 gender pronouns but only 3 exist at present.
  • Zande: Masculine, feminine, animate, and inanimate.
  • Bantu languages have many noun classes.[13]
    • Rwanda-Rundi family of languages (including Kinyarnwanda,[14] Kirundi,[15] and Ha[16]): 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.[17]
  • Sepik languages: Sepik languages all distinguish between at least masculine and feminine genders, but some distinguish three or more genders.[18]

References
  1. http://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/105/Esperanto16.pdf
  2. http://idolinguo.org.uk/bgrammar.htm
  3. http://mw.lojban.org/papri/Questions/en
  4. Elbert, Samuel H.; Pukui, Mary Kawena (1979). Hawaiian Grammar. University of Hawaii Press - HONOLULU. pp. 136–144. ISBN 9780824824891.
  5. van den Heuvel, Wilco (2006). Biak: Description of an Austronesian Language of Papua. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, fn. p. 100.
  6. https://web.archive.org/web/20070904225112/http://www.latrobe.edu.au/rclt/StaffPages/aikhenvald%2Bdownloads/ClassifiersELL2published.pdf
  7. Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, 1996. p.437
  8. "Ket – Ethnologue". Ethnologue. Retrieved 20 August 2019.
  9. Awde, Nicholas; Galaev, Muhammad (2014-05-22). Chechen-English English-Chechen Dictionary and Phrasebook. ISBN 9781136802331.
  10. Kibort, Anna; Corbett, Greville G. (2010-08-19). Features: Perspectives on a Key Notion in Linguistics. ISBN 9780199577743.
  11. https://scholar.harvard.edu/mpolinsky/files/Dyirbal.pdf
  12. 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
  13. Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (2016-09-05). How Gender Shapes the World. ISBN 9780191035692.
  14. https://www.africa.upenn.edu/NEH/rwlanguage.htm
  15. 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.
  16. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324224169_The_Ha_Language_of_Tanzania_Grammar_Texts_and_Vocabulary
  17. "Difficult Languages: Tongue Twisters - In search of the world's hardest language". The Economist. 2009-12-17. Retrieved 2009-12-23.
  18. 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. 4. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 197–432. ISBN 978-3-11-028642-7.
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