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In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called ...
Nouns seem to possess a well defined but covert system of grammatical gender. We may call a noun masculine, feminine or neuter depending on the pronouns which it selects in the singular. Mass or non-count nouns (such as frost, fog, water, love) are called neuter because they select the pronoun it. Count nouns divide into masculine and feminine.
Overview. Languages with grammatical gender, such as French, German, Greek, and Spanish, present unique challenges when it comes to creating gender-neutral language. Unlike genderless languages like English, constructing a gender-neutral sentence can be difficult or impossible in these languages due to the use of gendered nouns and pronouns.
Most likely it classified nouns as animate, so like living — and inanimate, so like objects," said Dorman. Today Dorman says 44% of languages have grammatical gender systems, which can help ease ...
Indo-European. Afrikaans (Afrikaans has three gendered pronouns, but no other grammatical gender, very similar to English.) English (English has three gendered pronouns, but no longer has grammatical gender in the sense of noun class distinctions.) Kurdish (Central and Southern Dialects only.) Niger-Congo.
Gender-neutral language or gender-inclusive language is language that avoids reference towards a particular sex or gender. In English, this includes use of nouns that are not gender-specific to refer to roles or professions, [1] formation of phrases in a coequal manner, and discontinuing the collective use of male or female terms. [2]
Genderless languages do have various means to recognize natural gender, such as gender-specific words ( mother, son, etc., and distinct pronouns such as he and she in some cases), as well as gender-specific context, both biological and cultural. Genderless languages are listed at list of languages by type of grammatical genders.
Swahili is a Bantu language spoken in many parts of Africa such as Kenya and Tanzania. It is largely gender neutral in specific nouns. Words such as actor/actress (mwigaji wa hadithi) and waiter/waitress (mtumishi mezani) are gender neutral among most others in the language. The words he, him, she, her translate to a single word in Swahili, yeye.