Why Do Languages Have Grammatical Gender? | Ask a Linguist

If you're a native English speaker, you were probably surprised the first time you encountered grammatical gender. So what is grammatical gender, and why do 25% of all languages have it? One of our linguists, Jennifer, explains.

Follow us on social media:

[diinalens]

my first language is italian and we have only the two genders m/f and we gender EVERYTHING. it was never a problem when learning english because i just have to "switch off" and use "the" for everything, and french was pretty easy because being so similar the majority of nouns have the same gender. but then i did one year of german and oh boy. that was a mess. i could not for the life of me remember which nouns where m and which f, except for the obvious ones which refer to people. and also it was so weird referring to objects which to me where clearly fem in a masc way (and viceversa)! and that's just a great way to start seeing that gender in german grammar seems to be the basis for fucking everything.

[jfhow]

It certainly is not to make learning another language easy.

[Torsengi]

*"Laughs in gender free language"*

[me-bell]

In Croatian, there is masculine, feminine and neutral, but it's very simple because every feminine gender noun ends with A, neutral with O and masculine with almost every other letter!

[tideghost]

Me laughs in Hindi, that has gendered conjugations for the verbs.
मैं अच्छा हँ। "I'm fine" said by male speaker.
मैं अच्छी हूँ। "I'm fine" said by female speaker.
So, the speaker's gender is always clear. But oddly enough, the word he/she/that वो (vo) is the same for all three.
Interestingly, it's kind of opposite of some languages that we have -ā ending nouns for mostly masculine and -ī ending ones are mostly feminine (it gets a bit complicated when the noun has neither ending, and especially when it's a loanword from another language).

[abderrazakbaddou]

I don't think you answered the question WHY!! you just described what some languages have and others don't!

[Imperions]

Kazakh language is too non gender language as Turkish. There is in Kazakh language only one universal word " O'L ". (read as spelled). We have gender words as turkish but we don't use them, even if we know gender. And we don't have to transform (Convert) verbs or other words for their gender, as it should have to be in Russian, for example.

[nomadicmonkey]

Glad to know that grammatical genders aren't devised by some sinister Ancients just in order to mess up with future learners. Come to think of it I sorta remember a couple of times when the gender of a word did work as a crutch for me when trying to recall that word from memory.
As a native speaker of Japanese it strikes me as interesting that the Japanese language throws not only the grammatical gender but also the very concept of pronouns out of the window seemingly altogether*. On the flip side It's got tons and tons of gendered speech markers that differentiate and identify the individual speaker as male, female and various inbetweens with myriad intersections with class, social interactions, display of affection/distance and whatnot.

*I often see well-intentioned language-learning related articles online that say something along the lines of "There are such diverse and colourful personal pronouns in Japanese at your disposal" but in my opinion they're misguided at best, because none of watashi, ore, boku, anata, kimi, kare, kanojo, or (insert one of your choice) are "pronouns" that work in the way they do in English or any other IE languages as far as I know of, in which the grammatical structure often requires pronouns to form a complete sentence. On the other hand in Japanese I can't come up with a sentence that strictly requires aforementioned words on a grammatical level. So 999 times out of 1000 when you use a pronoun in a sentence in English it's best to omit these "pronouns" in Japanese unless you're in a classroom.

[Andreas-bwzx]

I love my native language Armenian, also Turkish, Persian, English, no grammatocal gender=easy

[huypham]

I’ll research more of this on my Feminine Computer which is placed on my Masculine Desk in my Neutral Room 👌🏻😎

[Scaboful]

I personally can't really confirm that advantage when you're speaking, at least not as a bilingual (Spanish and German). Man, it happens so often that I start a sentence already having used and prepared one gender (with articles, adapted adjectives or pronouns) only to realize the coming noun actually has another gender. I have to say though that it happens more often when speaking German, since it's not my mother tongue, but I grew up with it since babyhood. Speaking Swiss German doesn't make it easier, since some words (don't know why) don't use the same gender.
Now, English may be easy to learn because of the lack of genders, but do you realize that barely anyone mentions how hard it is to know how to spell words or pronounce them when you read them? Iberian Spanish or even French are more reliable and consistent in that topic.

[eukarya_]

In Spanish we technically have three genders although effectively we only use two of them, as neutral gender has merged almost completely with the masculine.
This has caused trouble and misscomceptions by Spanish speakers that don't really understand their own language trying to come up whith a gender-neutral Spanish that thankfully never took off because oh boy was it disastrous.

[kelvingobble]

This didn't explain "why" at all. Why are shirts feminine and pants masculine in French and Spanish? What's the point of having to memorize articles that add nothing to the noun, especially when there are also exceptions?

[ismailhacihasanov]

In Russian also 3 genders: мужской род - m, женский род - f и средний род - n. But it's easy to define. If the word ends with consonant it's generally masculine, if with vowel (except o, е) it's feminine. And if words ends with o, е so it's neutrum. But of course there some exceptions, and difficulties. For example папА (dad) - masculine because he's a man. Or шимпанзе (chimpanzee) - masculine. The most difficult thing about genders in Russian - The words ending with letter ь. It's impossible to define is it masculine or feminine.
Лень (Laziness) - feminine
Пень (Stump of the tree) - masculine
День (Day) - masculine
But in the comparison with German Russian genders are super-easy))

[thomaskember]

In Mandarin Chinese the third person pronoun ta covers masculine, feminine and neutral in speech but it is written differently depending on gender. I think this was introduced due to western influence. Other languages such as Hebrew have different gender forms for second person pronouns. I found that this might be happening in Mandarin. I was in a hospital waiting to have an X-ray. On the wall was a notice in
several languages saying that if you were pregnant, tell the nurse. The Mandarin version had the second person pronoun ni altered to indicate a female was meant. I have never seen this character anywhere else having looked through every dictionary I could find. It seems whoever wrote the Mandarin version was trying to make a small change to this language.

[misterguts]

Hi Jennifer,
I do recall reading once that gender in French was used to mark the "agency" of nouns. Things that had "agency" or "could act upon" something were masculine, and things that "were acted upon" were feminine. The examples I saw were "The horse dances on the mountain (Le cheval danse sur la montagne)", or "The ship sails upon the sea (Le navire a navigué sur la mer)". But I do not know enough French to say how well this framework holds up, or holds up for other Romance languages. I would love to hear your take on this, and the opinion of speakers of French.

[ccaagg]

I feel like a lot of people here are suffering from the misconception that grammatical gender is tied to human gender, in that to say a noun is feminine is to say it shares properties with women. That's false, and I'll explain why.

The reason the grammatical genders, which I'll hereafter refer to as noun classes to avoid confusion, are 'masculine' and 'feminine' in languages with two noun classes is because men and women usually happen to be in different noun classes.
Since you have two noun classes, and one of the most intuitive distinctions between people humans have historically made is that of gender, it makes perfect sense to put the different genders in different noun classes, so they can be more easily told apart in language.

To say a noun is a feminine noun isn't to say it shares any properties with women. It just happens to belong to the same noun class that 'woman' does. Because, again, the distinction between genders has historically been important to humans, the noun classes were named based on which of the human genders they included. That's all there is to it.

That's why it's usually masculine/feminine for two-class systems and masculine/feminine/neuter for three. One class happens to contain men, one class happens to contain women, one class happens to contain neither.

You can see this distinction in how most people with non-binary gender identities use pronouns in three-class systems where the culture historically only has two genders when it comes to people.
It does happen, but it's unusual for non-binary people to use the pronouns of the 'neuter' noun class, because (due to the cultural precedent of there only being two genders for living things) all living things have to belong to either the 'masculine' noun class or the 'feminine' noun class. To use pronouns of the 'neuter' noun class is not to say that you identify as neither male nor female, but that you are a non-living inanimate object. Cultural gender is completely distinct from grammatical gender.
That's why the far more common solution is to create a nonstandard pronoun that doesn't tie their identity to one specific noun class or use the pronouns for the masculine and feminine noun classes interchangeably.

It's true that studies have shown grammatical gender has a measurable influence on cognition leading people to associate feminine words with more typically feminine human qualities, but this is the noun being classified as feminine leading people to see it as having more feminine qualities, _not_ the other way round.

[raindropsneverfall]

In Danish – and Norwegian and Swedish – we used to have three genders, as well. The masculine and the feminine gender have combined into what we call 'fælleskøn' (common gender) in Danish or 'utrum' in Latin. The other grammatical gender we have preserved is the neutral one. Some dialects have preserved the three genders in Denmark and Norway and possibly in Sweden, as well. There's even a dialect in Denmark that only has one grammatical gender.

[sombhatta]

Hindi is gendered but not in the same way as the Euro languages. There are no articles and there is no difference between he and she on the pronouns front, though there is on his and her. Nouns still have inbuilt genders which are usually expressed through *verbs*. This is why it's impossible to talk about oneself without giving away one's own gender - and the same is true when talking of anyone / anything else. You just can't talk without verbs.

[TheMichaelsuazo]

austronesian languages don’t use gendered nouns and pronouns which can be advantageous in many areas