18 Facts About Grammatical gender

In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities.

Languages with grammatical gender usually have two to four different genders, but some are attested with up to 20.

Common Grammatical gender divisions include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine, and neuter; or animate and inanimate.

Some Grammatical gender contrasts are referred to as classes; for some examples, see Noun class.

Grammatical gender can be realized as inflection and can be conditioned by other types of inflection, especially number inflection, where the singular-plural contrast can interact with gender inflection.

In Welsh, Grammatical gender marking is mostly lost on nouns; however, Welsh has initial mutation, where the first consonant of a word changes into another in certain conditions.

Additionally, in many languages, Grammatical gender is often closely correlated with the basic unmodified form of the noun, and sometimes a noun can be modified to produce masculine and feminine words of similar meaning.

In some languages the Grammatical gender is distinguished only in singular number but not in plural.

Natural Grammatical gender of a noun, pronoun or noun phrase is a Grammatical gender to which it would be expected to belong based on relevant attributes of its referent.

However, a switch to the natural Grammatical gender is never possible with articles and attributive pronouns or adjectives.

In some languages, Grammatical gender is determined by strictly semantic criteria, but in other languages, semantic criteria only partially determine Grammatical gender.

In such cases, one says that the feminine Grammatical gender is semantically marked, whereas the masculine Grammatical gender is unmarked.

In some languages, any Grammatical gender markers have been so eroded over time that they are no longer recognizable.

Such Grammatical gender shifts are sometimes correlated with meaning shifts, and sometimes yield doublets with no difference in meaning.

Many of the words where it is possible to choose Grammatical gender are inanimate objects that one might suspect would be conjugated with the neuter Grammatical gender.

Grammatical gender is a common phenomenon in the world's languages.

Conversely, grammatical gender is usually absent from the Koreanic, Japonic, Tungusic, Turkic, Mongolic, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, Uralic and most Native American language families.

The animate–inanimate opposition for the masculine Grammatical gender applies in the singular, and the personal–impersonal opposition, which classes animals along with inanimate objects, applies in the plural.