, countries can have masculine (blue), feminine (red) or neuter (yellow) names. Countries with plural non-masculine names are green. There are no country names in Polish with plural masculine personal gender. There are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders: • according to their form (
morphological) • according to logical or symbolic similarities in their meaning (
semantic) • according to arbitrary convention (lexical, possibly rooted in the language's history). In most languages that have grammatical gender, a combination of these three types of criteria is found, although one type may be more prevalent.
Form-based morphological criteria In many languages, nouns are assigned to gender largely without any semantic basis—that is, not based on any feature (such as animacy or sex) of the person or thing that a noun represents. In such languages there may be a correlation, to a greater or lesser degree, between gender and the form of a noun (such as the vowel or consonant or syllable with which it ends). For example, in
Portuguese and
Spanish, nouns that end in are mostly masculine, whereas those that end in are mostly feminine, regardless of their meaning. Nouns that end in some other vowel or a consonant are assigned a gender either according to
etymology, by analogy, or by some other convention. These rules may override semantics in some cases: for example, the noun / ("member") is always masculine, even when it refers to a girl or a woman, and / ("person") is always feminine, even when it refers to a boy or a man, a kind of
form-meaning mismatch. In other cases, meaning takes precedence: the noun "communist" is masculine when it refers or could refer to a man, even though it ends with . Nouns in Spanish and Portuguese, as in the other
Romance languages such as Italian and French, generally follow the gender of the Latin words from which they are derived. When nouns deviate from the rules for gender, there is usually an etymological explanation: ("problem") is masculine in Spanish because it was derived from a Greek noun of the neuter gender, whereas ("photo") and ("broadcast signal") are feminine because they are
clippings of and respectively, both grammatically feminine nouns. Most Spanish nouns in are feminine. They derive from Latin feminines in , accusative . The opposite is correct with Northern
Kurdish language or
Kurmanci. For example, the words (member) and (friend) can be masculine or feminine according to the person they refer to. • (His daughter is my friend) • (His son is my friend)
Suffixes often carry a specific gender. For example, in
German,
diminutives with the suffixes and , meaning 'little, young', are always neuter, even if they refer to people, as with 'girl' and 'young woman' . Similarly, the suffix , which makes
countable nouns from uncountable nouns ( 'dough' → 'piece of dough'), or personal nouns from abstract nouns ( 'teaching', 'punishment' → 'apprentice', 'convict') or adjectives ( 'cowardly' → 'coward'), always produces masculine nouns. And the German suffixes and (comparable with
-hood and
-ness in English) produce feminine nouns. In
Irish, most nouns ending with a broad consonant are masculine, those ending with a slender consonant are feminine (see
Irish phonology), with significant exceptions: nouns ending in / and are always masculine, whereas those ending or are always feminine. In
Arabic, nouns whose singular form ends in a
tāʾ marbūṭah (traditionally a , becoming in
pausa) are of feminine gender, the only significant exceptions being the word ("
caliph") and certain masculine personal names (
ʾUsāmah). However, many masculine nouns have a
"broken" plural form ending in a
tāʾ marbūṭa; for example '''' ("male professor") has the plural , which might be confused for a feminine singular noun. Gender may also be predictable from the type of
derivation: for instance, the
verbal nouns of Stem II (e.g. , from ) are always masculine. In
French, nouns ending in tend to be feminine, whereas others tend to be masculine, but there are many exceptions to this ( , , , , are masculine as , , , , are feminine), note the many masculine nouns ending in preceded by double consonants. Certain suffixes are quite reliable indicators, such as , which when added to a verb ( "to park" → ; nettoyer "to clean" → "cleaning") indicates a masculine noun; however, when is part of the root of the word, it can be feminine, as in ("beach") or . On the other hand, nouns ending in , and are almost all feminine, with a few exceptions, such as , . Nouns can sometimes vary their form to enable the
derivation of differently gendered
cognate nouns; for example, to produce nouns with a similar meaning but referring to someone of a different sex. Thus, in Spanish, means "boy", and means "girl". This paradigm can be exploited for making new words: from the masculine nouns "lawyer", "member of parliament" and "doctor", it was straightforward to make the feminine equivalents , , and . In the same way,
personal names are frequently constructed with affixes that identify the sex of the bearer. Common feminine suffixes used in English names are
-a, of
Latin or
Romance origin (
Robert and
Roberta); and
-e, of
French origin (cf.
Justin and
Justine). Although gender inflection may be used to construct nouns and names for people of different sexes in languages that have grammatical gender, this alone does not constitute grammatical gender. Distinct words and names for men and women are also common in languages which do not have a grammatical gender system for nouns in general. English, for example, has feminine suffixes such as
-ess (as in
waitress), and also distinguishes male and female personal names, as in the above examples.
Differentiation of personal names Given names are proper nouns and they follow the same gender grammatical rules as common nouns. In most Indo-European languages female grammatical gender is created using an "a" or an "e" ending. Classical Latin typically made a grammatical feminine gender with ( "forest", "water") and this was reflected in feminine names originating in that period, like Emilia. Romance languages preserved this characteristic. For example, in Spanish, approximately 89% of nouns that end in
-a or -
á are classified as feminine; the same is true for 98% of given names with the
-a ending. In the Germanic languages the female names have been Latinized by adding
-e and
-a: Brunhild, Kriemhild and Hroswith became Brunhilde, Kriemhilde and Hroswitha. Slavic feminine given names: Olga (Russian), Małgorzata (Polish), Tetiana (Ukrainian), Oksana (Belarusian), Eliška (Czech), Bronislava (Slovak), Milica (Serbian), Darina (Bulgarian), Lucja (Croatian), Lamija (Bosnian) and Zala (Slovenian).
Differentiation of nouns with human referents In some languages, nouns with human references have two forms, a male and a female one. This includes not only proper names, but also names for occupations and nationalities. Examples include: • English proper names: • male:
Andrew • female:
Andrea • common:
Chris for both male and female • English occupation names • male:
waiter • female:
waitress • common:
doctor for both male and female • Greek proper names () and () • Greek occupation names () "actor" for both male and female in Greek and () "doctor" for both, but with informal female variants () and () • Greek nationality names have five possibilities for 'English'. • male: () • female: () • masculine: () • feminine: () • neuter: () To complicate matters, Greek often offers additional informal versions of these. The corresponding for English are the following: (), (), (), (), (). The formal forms come from the name () "England", while the less formal are derived from Italian .
Meaning-based semantic criteria In some languages, gender is determined by strictly semantic criteria, but in other languages, semantic criteria only partially determine gender.
Strict semantic criteria In some languages, the gender of a noun is directly determined by its physical attributes (sex, animacy, etc.), and there are few or no exceptions to this rule. There are relatively few such languages. The
Dravidian languages use this system as described
below. Another example is the
Dizi language, which has two asymmetrical genders. The feminine includes all living beings of female sex (e.g. woman, girl, cow...) and
diminutives; the masculine encompasses all other nouns (e.g. man, boy, pot, broom...). In this language, feminine nouns are always marked with
-e or
-in. Another African language,
Defaka, has three genders: one for all male humans, one for all female humans, and a third for all the remaining nouns. Gender is only marked in personal pronouns. Standard English pronouns are very similar in this respect, although the English gendered pronouns (
he,
she) are used for domestic animals if the sex of the animal is known, and sometimes for certain objects such as ships, e.g. "What happened to the Titanic? She (or it) sank."
Mostly semantic criteria In some languages, the gender of nouns can mostly be determined by physical (semantic) attributes, although there remain some nouns whose gender is not assigned in this way (Corbett calls this "semantic residue"). The world view (e.g. mythology) of the speakers may influence the division of categories. •
Zande has four genders: male human, female human, animal, and inanimate. However, there are about 80 nouns representing inanimate entities which are nonetheless animate in gender: heavenly objects (moon, rainbow), metal objects (hammer, ring), edible plants (sweet potato, pea), and non-metallic objects (whistle, ball). Many have a round shape or can be explained by the role they play in mythology. •
Ket has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and most gender assignment is based on semantics, but there are many inanimate nouns outside the neuter class. Masculine nouns include male animates, most fish, trees, the moon, large wooden objects, most living beings and some religious items. Feminine nouns include female animates, three types of fish, some plants, the sun and other heavenly objects, some body parts and skin diseases, the soul, and some religious items. Words for part of a whole, as well as most other nouns that do not fall into any of the aforementioned classes, are neuter. The gender assignment of non-sex-differentiable things is complex. In general, those of no importance to the Kets are feminine, whereas objects of importance (e.g. fish, wood) are masculine. Mythology is again a significant factor. •
Alamblak has two genders, masculine and feminine. However, the masculine also includes things which are tall or long and slender, or narrow (e.g. fish, snakes, arrows and slender trees), whereas the feminine gender has things which are short, squat or wide (e.g. turtles, houses, shields and squat trees). • In French, the distinction between the gender of a noun and the gender of the object it refers to is clear when nouns of different genders can be used for the same object, for example vélo (m.) = bicyclette (f.).
Contextual determination of gender There are certain situations where the assignment of gender to a noun, pronoun or noun phrase may not be straightforward. This includes in particular: • groups of mixed gender; • references to people or things of unknown or unspecified gender. In languages with masculine and feminine gender, the masculine is usually employed by default to refer to persons of unknown gender and to groups of people of mixed gender. Thus, in French the feminine plural pronoun always designates an all-female group of people (or stands for a group of nouns all of feminine gender), but the masculine equivalent may refer to a group of males or masculine nouns, to a mixed group, or to a group of people of unknown genders. In such cases, one says that the feminine gender is
semantically marked, whereas the masculine gender is unmarked. In English, the problem of gender determination does not arise in the plural, because gender in that language is reflected only in pronouns, and the plural pronoun
they does not have gendered forms. In the singular, however, the issue frequently arises when a person of unspecified or unknown gender is being referred to. In this case it the
Singular they has been traditional. Since the 18th century it has been prescribed to use the masculine (
he), but other solutions are now often preferred. In languages with a neuter gender, such as
Slavic and
Germanic languages, the neuter is often used for indeterminate gender reference, particularly when the things referred to are not people. In some cases this may even apply when referring to people, particularly children. For example, in English, one may use
it to refer to a child, particularly when speaking generically rather than about a particular child of known sex. In
Icelandic (which preserves a masculine–feminine–neuter distinction in both singular and plural), the neuter plural can be used for groups of people of mixed gender, when specific people are meant. For example: • 'They (.) had met in the forest when the old woman (.) was a young girl and the emperor (.) was only a prince.' However, when referring to previously unmentioned groups of people or when referring to people in a generic way, especially when using an indefinite pronoun like 'some' or 'all', the masculine plural is used. For example: • 'Some people have the habit of talking to themselves.' An example contrasting the two ways to refer to groups is the following, taken from advertisements of Christian congregations announcing their meetings: • 'All welcome' is understood to be more general whereas is more specific and emphasises the individuality of the group members. That the masculine is seen in Icelandic as the most generic or 'unmarked' of the three genders can also be seen in the fact that the nouns for most professions are masculine. Even feminine job descriptions historically filled by women, like 'nurse' and 'nursery school teacher' (both .), have been replaced with masculine ones as men have started becoming more represented in these professions: 'nurse' and 'nursery school teacher' (both .). In
Swedish (which has an overall common–neuter gender system), masculinity may be argued to be a marked feature, because in the
weak adjectival declension there is a distinct ending () for naturally masculine nouns (as in , "my little brother"). In spite of this, the third-person singular masculine pronoun would normally be the default for a person of unknown gender, although in practice the indefinite pronoun and the reflexive or its possessive forms usually make this unnecessary. In
Polish, where a gender-like distinction is made in the plural between "masculine personal" and all other cases , a group is treated as masculine personal if it contains at least one male person. In languages which preserve a three-way gender division in the plural, the rules for determining the gender (and sometimes number) of a
coordinated noun phrase ("... and ...") may be quite complex.
Czech is an example of such a language, with a division (in the plural) between masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine, and neuter. The rules for gender and number of coordinated phrases in that language are summarized at .
Arbitrary conventional criteria In some languages, any gender markers have been so eroded over time (possibly through
deflexion) that they are no longer recognizable. Many German nouns, for example, do not indicate their gender through either meaning or form. In such cases a noun's gender must simply be memorized, and gender can be regarded as an integral part of each noun when considered as an entry in the speaker's
lexicon. (This is reflected in
dictionaries, which typically indicate the gender of noun
headwords where applicable.)
Second-language learners are often encouraged to memorize a modifier, usually a
definite article, in conjunction with each noun—for example, a learner of French may learn the word for "chair" as (meaning "the chair"); this carries the information that the noun is , and that it is feminine (because is the feminine singular form of the definite article). == Gender shifts ==