Gender (definition)

for information about Gender in Scottish Gaelic see Gender

Grammatical gender refers to classes of particular nouns based on their inflectional endings and overall word structure. It is also sometimes known as noun class. Grammatical Gender is not be confused with the biological sex of an object or person or psychological gender of a person. While many biologically male objects might hold masculine grammatical gender in a language, they need not be masculine. Grammatical Gender is typically arbitrary. Languages can have any number of grammatical genders. Many Indo-European Languages have three (masculine, feminine and neuter), but others -- like Scottish Gaelic -- have only two: masculine and feminine. Indigenous languages of Africa, North America, and Australia often have many more genders than 3.

External Links

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• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender

References

• Matthews, P. H. (1997) The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Crystal, David (1999) The Penguin Dictionary of Language. London: Penguin.