Some of the derived feminine forms may carry a negative connotation such as the suffix - ette in gendarmette n. In French, generically used forms are found both in nominal forms e. Asymmetries: What types of asymmetric forms or semantic features can be observed in the lexicon? For example, address terms may not be symmetrical between women and men e. Note that in some cases more fine-grained distinctions based on usage have not been exhaustively documented in the table see Supplementary Table S1 for practical reasons.
For example, a given form may exist, but its usage may be infrequent or fading. We still qualify it as present but urge that researchers interested in these particular features should always carefully control for its usage.
For each feature, the following classification has been used:. Note that this tag was only used in reference to usage in Sections 2—4.
When cells in the table concern other groups of languages in Section 1, these are filled in with the indication not applicable. Psycholinguistic investigations of the way people perceive gender have shown different biases associated with the particulars of grammatical gender.
Not surprisingly, since many languages possess grammatical gender, these investigations have been conducted across a wide range of languages. However, between language comparisons — as rich as they may be — face intrinsic questions of legitimate comparability.
In the present language index, we present different grammatical gender dimensions that might be of special interest for those interested in cross-languages comparisons in the way grammatical gender constrains our mental representations of women and men.
However, constructing a language index raises some important issues that also need to be taken into consideration in order to document how grammatical gender is encoded across languages. While the classification of languages into one of the five main categories that we established genderless, natural gender, etc. One such issue is the necessity to determine whether some features are truly productive in a language.
This question can hardly be answered based on the intuitions of native-speaking informants alone, as it requires the use of quantitative analyses.
This implies that for every feature in every language, a correct estimation of its prevalence would require extensive studies of language use in corpus data. Conducting such empirical analyses is beyond the scope of our index. While conscious of the limitations of our approach, we had to content ourselves with an estimation of usage provided by native speaker informants that we divided into three intuitive categories i.
These categories provide an estimation that should therefore be treated with caution, and are best used as a starting point for researchers who are interested in one particular aspect of gender differences. Another limitation of our index is that the usage of feminine forms has evolved over the past decades in many languages.
As a result, many forms that are attested may now be falling out of use. For example, the use of the word le minister to designate a female government minister in French is now declining, following an official decision from the French government in to feminize occupation names for women Cerquiglini, Thus, even though some naming practices might be recognized by informants as existing in their language, it does not mean that they still correspond to current practices, or would not be recognized as sexist by its speakers.
Here again, extensive studies of languages use that go well beyond the scope of our index would be needed to determine the nature of current practices. Yet again, we believe that our index represents a useful starting point for researchers who want to investigate these questions.
Another issue is that naming practices often vary from country to country, even when those countries share the same language. French is a case in point. While in France, the feminization of occupation names for women is a recent phenomenon, the use of feminine names was already current practice decades earlier in other French-speaking countries such as Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland.
Finally, our index contains a sample of 15 languages, representing mostly the Indo-European family. However, grammatical gender distinctions are widespread across the languages of the world. Adding languages from other families that fall into this category would therefore bring valuable enrichments to our index, allowing us to move beyond Western cultural representations of sex and gender, as cultural differences have an impact of the representation of gender.
For example, Corbett b reports that in Lak, a language spoken in the central Dagestan highlands, girls were not classified within the category of rational females, which for example applied to grown-up women, but in the category of other non-male and non-female animate beings.
This classification led to an evolution of usage concerning the terms of address for young women. Using the gender marking for animate but not females when addressing young women became a sign of politeness. Aside from such anecdotal examples, documentation of gender-related usage for these languages is to a large extent lacking. We hope, however, to be able to enrich the present database in the future with more publications on languages for which gender-related usage can be collected.
PG prepared the first draft of the manuscript and coordinated the work among all authors. DE and SZ completed the index and collected the final data for it. AG worked on the final draft of the manuscript. FB, JO, and AG created the first version of the index and organised the collection of the initial data for the languages presented in the Supplementary Material.
All authors worked on their specific language to complete the index. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Revisiting masculine and feminine grammatical gender in spanish: linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic evidence. Bodine, A. Cerquiglini, B. Le Ministre est Enceinte. Paris: Seuil. The problem is that not everybody agrees on what that language should be.
There has been an important interplay between conversations around gender and identity, and how they are represented in language. People have also found ways to create gender-neutral options within existing language structures. Shweta Vaidya, a transgender writer based in Mumbai, uses the plural hum we form of Hindi as a gender-neutral alternative.
Gender identity and expression are unique in every culture, but the language around them is still limited. Western definitions of gender variance tend to overshadow how we view gender identity, even in other parts of the world. Translation is not easy, especially when you try to translate cultural experiences into identities. In this way, language has an undeniable impact on who can access equal rights.
Language reform is possible, but it takes time. Basically, gender in languages is just one way of breaking up nouns into classes. Researchers believe that Proto-Indo-European had two genders: animate and inanimate.
If you grew up speaking a nongendered language like English, trying to learn a gendered language can be tricky. You have to remember which word goes with which gender, a classification that is often completely arbitrary and counterintuitive. Here are some helpful hints. How is a key like a woman? Eventually, some languages may shed their pesky nonsensical gender distinctions as the countries that speak them pursue equality between men and women.
The Guardian has suggested this may be on the horizon for German. What do you think? Does grammatical gender make it more difficult to learn a new language? Should languages that use grammatical gender try o find a new system to use in the name of equality, or is that a bridge too far?
Share your thoughts in the comments! I love Calvin and Hobbes but had totally forgotten about that one. It says nothing about why languages have gender. Why would anyone introduce such a difficulty into a language? And yet it is so common. It seems odd that languages only feel the need to group the vast number of nouns into only 2,3 or maybe 4 groups. If there is an advantage in grouping then why restrict it to such a small number of groups and if there is no advantage then why do it all?
Good question, Martin. My mostly uneducated guess is that humans love to classify things. I am no expert, but maybe gender started for the words that do relate to gender or things men use or women use. When it came time to codify gender articles from neighboring valleys, the winning choice may have been picked for a variety of reasons, leaving a pattern that seems arbitrary today. Since sex is a very important emotional part of our brains, maybe a sex tag helped early people to tag and remember words as vocabulary grew.
Now we should simplify language for easier learning. When worrying about papa be careful not to masculinities it. Ask an Argentinian… Or think of an English 4 letter word beginning with c. Verbs and adjectives have also been put into groups, with different ways of conjugation. Even genderless languages like Japanese and Korean are guilty of this. Still, I think languages can do without them. I mean, it works out fine for languages like English and Japanese. In Japanese, some words are masculine and feminine, or strictly spoken by men.
This is just with the spoken language. German gender. One must learn the gender together with the noun as though it were one word rather than two. After all, they modernized their hand-written alphabet ninety or so years back. The English language is relatively easy to learn regards its one article, the THE. Spelling is the bug-a-boo. English needs to modernize spelling, tossing out the many French spellings.
In many languages unlike English if translated literally, you would have people saying "the masculine case X," "the feminine case that," or "the neuter case this other. Some languages have even more gender cases than the set three I just mentioned. In most languages that have these divisions, there seems to be no rhyme or reason as far as why something is whatever gender-specific case it is. Yet, it seems even English isn't immune, we have people calling a car, boat, or plane a "her.
BTW, I know there are similar questions, but what I'm asking is slightly different and between the lines of some of the questions that have been asked before, and not been explicitly stated, and may bring some interesting conversation, so I ask it remain open. Well, to answer the titular question, most languages don't have multiple genders.
You could get away with saying that many languages have multiple genders, as long as you take 2 to be the lower bound on "multiple" which in a certain sense, follows from what "multiple" means. A language can't have only one gender: the logic of gender means that nouns have to be split into kinds. If there aren't at least two, you don't have kinds. There are two kinds of kinds: natural, and arbitrary.
The former refers to systems where nouns are classified according to some meaning property, and the latter is the situation where nouns are divided arbitrarily. It appears, from a historical analysis of gender systems, that arbitrary gender systems derive from natural gender systems which have gotten sufficiently complicated that nobody can figure out the natural system anymore, so instead you just memorize things. There are not any attested absolutely arbitrary gender systems, but western European languages come pretty close.
So whether most languages with gender fall into the "more or less arbitrary" subset depends on how you draw the dividing line between "mostly arbitrary" vs.
Languages have gender which isn't just about sex because it has had been useful to say things about the nature of objects. English has almost freed itself of gender distinctions, but we do still have differences in pronouns. Some Kurdish dialects likewise have eliminated noun gender except that it is sort of possible to distinguish male and female human 3rd person pronouns.
We're moving towards getting rid of the pronoun distinction, so just be patient and in a few more centuries it will be gone. There seems to be some confusion over arbitrariness. In the architypical natural gender system, gender actually is assigned by rules that refer to semantic property. Since arbitrary gender systems derive from natural gender systems, there are often statistical traces of that rule system. With a sufficiently rich coding system and statistical software, you can always eke out some correlation between e.
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