What is "grammatical gender"

n. a grammatical category in inflected languages governing the agreement between nouns and pronouns and adjectives; in some languages it is quite arbitrary but in Indo-European languages it is usually based on sex or animateness [syn: gender]

In linguistics, grammatical gender is a specific form of noun-class system in which the division of noun classes forms an agreement system with another aspect of the language, such as adjectives, articles, pronouns, or verbs. This system is used in approximately one quarter of the world's languages. In these languages, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called gender;There are different views whether or not pluralia tantum always have a gender:

• Wilfried Kürschner (Grammatisches Kompendium, 6. edition, 2008, p. 121) for example states that German pluralia tantum do not have a gender.
• The Duden (Duden Grammatik, 8. edition, p. 152f.) for example states that all German pluralia tanta have a gender, but it can not be determined. the values present in a given language (of which there are usually two or three) are called the genders of that language. According to one definition: "Genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behaviour of associated words."

Common gender divisions include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine and neuter; or animate and inanimate. In a few languages, the gender assignment of nouns is solely determined by their meaning or attributes, like biological sex, humanness, animacy. However, in most languages, this semantic division is only partially valid, and many nouns may belong to a gender category that contrasts with their meaning (e.g. the word for "manliness" could be of feminine gender). In this case, the gender assignment can also be influenced by the morphology or phonology of the noun, or in some cases can be apparently arbitrary.

Grammatical gender manifests itself when words related to a noun like determiners, pronouns or adjectives change their form ( inflect) according to the gender of noun they refer to ( agreement). The parts of speech affected by gender agreement, the circumstances in which it occurs, and the way words are marked for gender vary between languages. Gender inflection may interact with other grammatical categories like number or case. In some languages the declension pattern followed by the noun itself will be different for different genders.

Grammatical gender is found in many Indo-European languages (including Latin, Spanish, French, Russian, and German, but not Persian, for example), Afro-Asiatic languages (which includes the Semitic and Berber languages, etc.), and in other language families such as Dravidian and Northeast Caucasian, as well as several Australian Aboriginal languages like Dyirbal, and Kalaw Lagaw Ya. Also, most Niger–Congo languages have extensive systems of noun classes, which can be grouped into several grammatical genders. On the other hand, grammatical gender is usually absent from the Altaic, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, Uralic and most Native American language families. Modern English is not considered to have grammatical gender, although Old English had it, and some remnants of a gender system exist, such as the distinct personal pronouns he, she, and it. However, aside from a handful of nouns like "god" and "goddess", "duke" and "duchess", "tiger" and "tigress", and "waiter" and "waitress", gender is almost exclusively found in pronouns and titles. Because gendered nouns and pronouns accurately reflect the biological sex of whatever they represent, with all male animate beings being assigned as masculine, all female animate beings being assigned as feminine, and all inanimate objects being assigned as neuter, English is said to have natural gender.