If you peruse the maps and cartographical side of social media, you might have encountered several maps showing the countries of the world coloured by whether they are masculine, feminine, or if applicable, neuter, in languages like French, German, and so on. Very often, these maps would be accompanied by laughing reactions, or some comments that kind of miss the point of the map. And so today, inspired by this general misconception surrounding grammatical gender, I want to try to make simple and demystify some things related to this very grammatical feature.
Humans generally love to classify things, and many languages used across the world would tend to sort the things and ideas perceived by their speakers would tend to fall under categories called noun classes. Nouns may be sorted by animacy, biological sex, shape, and things like that, with various grammatical inflections assigned to each of these noun classes. Perhaps one of the most well-documented examples of the system of noun classes is that of the Bantu languages, with most of them recognising at least 10 noun classes. isiXhosa, for example, uses 15 noun classes, with distinct classes used for singular and plural nouns, humans, kinship terms, and body parts, amongst other distinctions. This includes the prefix um– (and plural aba-) for personal nouns and humans, and ubu- for some abstract nouns that do not carry a plural form.
Grammatical gender is technically a subset of this very noun class system. Very often, there are anywhere between two and four grammatical genders, though some recognise as many as six. How grammatical gender is termed varies from language to language, though most languages with two grammatical genders use a masculine – feminine contrast, with a smaller proportion using an animate – inanimate split, common – neuter split, and perhaps more rarely, a human – non-human contrast. On the other hand, languages with three grammatical genders typically use a masculine-feminine-neuter contrast like in German. Languages with more than three grammatical genders have more interesting contrasts, such as the Worrorra language in Australia, which contrasts masculine, feminine, terrestrial, celestial, and collective nouns, and some other Aboriginal Australian languages use a masculine-feminine-vegetable-neuter distinction. Some may also distinguish the non-masculine and non-feminine nouns by countability (countable vs uncountable), as with the Burushaski language in Pakistan.
Then again, there are entire language families that do not use a system of grammatical gender at all, or use a system of noun classifiers instead, as is common in the languages used in East Asia and some in the Pacific. Language families lacking a system of grammatical gender include the Uralic, Turkic, Dravidian, and most Austronesian languages. North American languages also lack grammatical gender as well.
For languages using a masculine-feminine contrast, the most obvious way grammatical gender is assigned to nouns would be by biological sex. You know, der Mann (the man), die Frau (the woman). However, this alone is insufficient for a gender system to develop, as with the classic German example of das Mädchen (neuter, the girl), and the Irish translation of the same word, cailín (m.). These exceptions are a minority, but for the case of das Mädchen, this is attributed to the classification of words containing the diminutive suffix -chen as neuter.
In some languages, morphology plays a significant role in assigning grammatical gender, with many well known patterns assigning nouns to grammatical genders by the letter or letters with which the word in question ends. In Russian, for example, words ending in consonants are almost always masculine, words ending in -a or -я are usually feminine, and words ending in -o or -e are neuter, with some exceptions. Case endings decline based on these grammatical genders, though further distinctions are made within the masculine gender based on animacy. Similarly, words ending in -esse, -euse, -onne, -ette, –elle, -ie, -t(i)é, -tion, and -aille, amongst many other endings, are typically feminine, while words ending in -ent, -oir, -ail, -asme / -isme, -teur, and -al, amongst many other endings, are typically masculine.
Another way nouns are assigned grammatical genders is through semantics, such as the physical attributes of a noun in question. The Alamblak language spoken in Papua New Guinea, for example, has a masculine-feminine contrast for its nouns, but nouns that are tall, long, narrow, or slender tend to be classified as masculine as well, and nouns that are short or wide tend to be classified as feminine.
How grammatical gender is assigned in some languages may seem more arbitrary though. The Chechen language uses a system of 6 grammatical genders, marked by the different prefixes used on the accompanying verb or some adjectives. The first two are used to denote humans, with the v-class of nouns marking male humans, and the y-class marking female humans, though some words used for humans do not fall in either grammatical genders. The other four are more lexically arbitrary though, and are marked as the y-class II, d-class, b-class, and the b-class II. Another more well known example is German. Aside from the suffixes that may indicate grammatical gender, such as -ung, -lein, and -chen, many German nouns must just be memorised together with their grammatical gender. Perhaps in centuries past, the patterns that would reflect this grammatical gender classification would have been more obvious, but to most learners of German, they are not really going to be as inquisitive about the word’s historical derivations to learn about its grammatical gender.
Circling back to the maps question, why are some countries, in heavy quotes here, ‘masculine’, and some ‘feminine’? Well, that pretty much boils down to the morphological endings of the country names in that language. These affect the definite article and adjective conjugations attached to the respective country, such as le Cambodge vs la France in French, which are assigned by grammatical gender of many other nouns like le pan and la femme. In French at least, except 6 countries (le Belize, le Cambodge, le Mexique, le Mozambique, le Suriname, le Zimbabwe), countries ending with the letter -e would use the definite article la, marking the feminine grammatical gender. Countries taking their name after a common noun, like [le] Royaume-Uni (United Kingdom), would correspond to the grammatical gender of that common noun.
Perhaps the most obvious question hanging in the air is, why is there a grammatical gender system in place anyway? If languages like English can combine all three grammatical genders once used in centuries before into just one today, and some other Germanic languages collapsing three grammatical genders (masculine-feminine-neuter) into two (common-neuter), what is stopping other languages from doing the same?
To better understand this shift, we have to look into the grammars of the languages that have undergone such shifts. Here, we will focus on Danish, though other well known examples include Dutch (now with de and het nouns) and Swedish (now with en and ett nouns). Standard Danish today uses a common-neuter system, but some varieties may still preserve the historical three-gender system, or got rid of grammatical gender entirely. The common gender is a merger of the traditional masculine and feminine grammatical genders, and is marked using the definite suffixes -en or -an. The neuter gender survived this merger in the varieties making up Standard Danish, and is marked using the definite suffix -et. Historically though, the masculine gender used the suffix -in, and the feminine gender used the suffix -æn. This similarity in endings made the prime target for a gradual merger in grammatical genders, as the suffixes merged to form the -en suffix we see in Standard Danish today. A similar pattern of merger might have been observed in similar languages like Swedish as well.
Grammatical gender plays a role in distinguishing homophones. For instance, the German word See can mean both ‘lake’ and ‘sea / ocean’, depending on which article is used. Der See would mean ‘lake’, and die See would mean ‘sea / ocean’. Similarly, in French, with its numerous homophones, would need grammatical gender to disambiguate these nouns. Pot (pot) and peau (skin) both carry the same pronunciation /po/, but are assigned different grammatical genders (le pot & la peau) allowing such disambiguation.
As seen in how nouns may be assigned to grammatical genders by morphology, grammatical gender also plays a role in assigning different conjugation or declension patterns to these collection of words. In languages such as Arabic (feminine gender is marked using the letter ة, the tāʔ marbūṭa), other word classes such as adjectives and for the case of Arabic, verbs, may conjugate based on grammatical gender as well. Grammatical gender thus serves as in indicator for the conjugation pattern to be used. Then again, I might have employed a bit of reverse causation here, as the way other word classes conjugate around a given noun could also be indicative of a noun’s grammatical gender.
And so, this has been a brief introduction to a rather common grammatical feature called the grammatical gender. I believe that I have only shown the tip of the iceberg, and have not really gone into the proposed relationships between grammatical gender and perceptions of nouns assigned with a given grammatical gender. There is probably some psycholinguistic mechanisms behind that, if such an association could be empirically ascertained. Anyway, I generally prefer to stick to the more morphological and phonological sides of things, and hence my preference to cover these aspects when writing up this introduction.
